Michelle de Kretser photo by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website – www.dfat.gov.au. Elif Batuman photo by Mikhahail Lemkhin, McMillan Publishers. Composite created in Canva without AI.

>“An artist once told me that she no longer wanted to make art that looked like art. I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.”
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

The buyer should always beware claims of new forms. Is there any possible form of fiction that fiction hasn’t already taken? “The novel was triumphant at the middle of the [19th] century,” says critic James Wood in his book The Broken Estate, “and there is a sense in which Melville, Flaubert, and Gogol, all of them writing roughly contemporaneously, were poets who wanted to make the novel a genre that could consume all others and then perform all their functions at once — a stomach of genres, digesting satire, poetry, epic, the historical novel, realism, and fable.” Since then, we have had the shifting interiority of Virginia Woolf, the arcane allusivity of James Joyce, the maximalist floridity of Marcel Proust, the self-referential disclosure of John Barth, the duplicitous gamesmanship of Vladimir Nabokov. So what could possibly be left for the novel to do that is new?

Still, when I first read the promotional blurb for Theory & Practice, winner of Australia’s 2025 Stella Prize, I was so intrigued by its concept that I paid Evil Billionaire Jeff Bezos more than I would have paid my beloved ThriftBooks just so the book would arrive on my doorstep the next day. This is a doorstep that receives so many books that my mailman incredulously asked if I had a nine-to-five. (True story.) The hook that helped de Kretser jump the line of my teetering TBR was its promised fusion of novel, memoir, and critical analysis of Virginia Woolf. That struck me as a genuine formal innovation.

But as I worked my way through the slender but compelling narrative, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had encountered its innovations somewhere before. Finally, it struck me like a pronouncement from a sagacious Greek Chorus: Elif Batuman. The chunked confessional episodes, the coming-of-age romance, the higher ed nostalgia, even the genre-defying insights into classical literature, all bore a distinct resemblance to Harvard Russian Lit alum Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot and its sequel Either/Or. Both authors aspire to reinvent the novel. Is either successful, or do they both fall victim to the timeless intonations of Ecclesiastes?

The Fiction/Memoir Hybrid

Both Batuman and de Kretser seek to invigorate the novel by blending memoir seamlessly into a fictional context. On a broad level, their stories follow a recognizable pattern, that of the Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. Both books feature protagonists seeking maturation through epiphanic romance but for whom no stake is higher than writerly ambition.

The novels are strikingly similar in plot and structure, but wildly divergent in scale. De Kretser’s Sri Lankan heroine, innominate but scornful of her name’s ubiquity (could it be Michelle?), learns the ropes of 1986 Melbourne postgrad life in 175 pages. Batuman’s Turkish American ingenue Selin Karadağ, a 1995 matriculant to Harvard’s literature program, takes two novels, two scholastic years, and 770 pages to achieve maturation. But both characters flit from day to day in chapterless episodes, single paragraphs to several pages in length, narratively aimless but for each character’s burgeoning attraction to an unavailable cad with a serious girlfriend and an incongruous readiness to flirt.

The Idiot, named after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1868 panegyric to naïveté, reads like an embarrassingly earnest freshman diary. Selin is bright, but every insight is raw and untested, dimly apprehended through the opaque scrim of inexperience. She soaks in education from every avenue, dormmates and Dostoevsky, fellowship and Fellini. Selin lacks confidence in every area but one: she has been an accomplished personal essayist since high school.

By Either/Or, which is also the title of Søren Kierkegaard’s contemplation of ethics and aesthetics, she has become bold to the point of reckless, hellbent on dispensing with her inconvenient virginity. Her intellectual takeaway runs along these lines:

>The aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl? … What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism had made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic. Just think of the angry, complaining men.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

The protagonist of Theory & Practice hits page one at the Either/Or end of the intellectual and sexual precocity spectrum. At school, she reveres Virginia Woolf’s message of gender equality while condemning her antisemitism and colonial conservatism. In her dating life, she is defiantly invested in a man who claims to be in a “deconstructed relationship.” Her takeaway echoes Selin’s:

>[I was struck] by the tremendous silencing power of shame. To whom could we confess our treacherous, rivalrous, trite, uncool, unfeminist feelings without shame? Shame could transform female solidarity into a scold’s bridle. It could ensure that a philosophy designed to free us set a weight on our tongues.
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

Both authors are expert personal essayists, and they’re not afraid to apply their skill to a novel. De Kretser’s expertise in this form informs her work as a university professor. Batuman’s is expressed in New Yorker articles and essay compilations. But is this a formal innovation, as promised in de Kretser’s pledge to “tell the truth”?

Not really. Both books are apparently heavily autobiographical, but the reader only recognizes them as memoir if they are exposed to outside information. In a hermetic reading, the claim to fiction/non-fiction hybridity is essentially bravado. The anecdotes may borrow the authentic ring of truth, but the books rely on the same narrative artifices that all novels employ. “Fiction is of course a form of lying,” wrote James Wood in his book The Broken Estate. “Fiction requests belief from us, but we can choose not to believe at any moment. … Our belief is itself metaphorical — it only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never wholly belief.” Even with certainty that an undisclosed portion of a novel actually took place in the life of its author, fiction’s essential contract remains unchanged.

The Critic as Novelist

The weightier claim to innovation is that of a novel that weaves academic literary analysis into its story. The extent to which Batuman attempts this is one of the greatest pleasures of her novels. But while the books teem with critical interpretations, her voice is one of sophomoric cogitation rather than genuine academic rigor. In one passage, Selin discusses Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the boy she is crushing on:

>He invents these supposedly complicated problems and then gets so worked up about them — like, it’s hell, it’s intolerable humiliation, it’s the mathematically highest point of abasement. But to me, none of those things seem particularly hellish or humiliating or complicated. When I can’t get worked up myself, I feel embarrassed. And tired. … It’s like he does this shoddy, depressing thing, killing an old lady — and instead of shoddy and depressing, it’s supposed to be an earthshaking philosophical crisis.”
Elif Batuman, The Idiot

In another, she reflects on a childhood memory from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust:

>The episode itself, about baby Proust’s anguish on nights when his parents had dinner guests, was harrowing. I didn’t like to admit it, but I was pretty sure that I had felt the same despair when my parents went to dinner parties. Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work; what was, for you, a cause of desperation, was for them an occasion for dress-up and celebration. But why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else?
Elif Batuman, Either/Or 

The goal of these passages is to illuminate characterization. Batuman is not attempting to get an A on a term paper.

What makes de Kretser’s book thrilling is that her ideas about Virginia Woolf are part of the novel’s larger argument. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual framework and lived experience: theory and practice. Her examination of Woolf’s casual antisemitism despite her marriage to a Jewish man reveals that the feminist icon’s theoretical heroism does not always convert to practical morality. The narrator is not just idly speculating about Woolf’s shortcomings. She is incorporating her thoughts into a verdict on her own behavior. De Kretser also draws parallels between the narrator’s experience of sexual callousness and the horrors of colonialism, expressed in a homework-inspired passage about Israeli/Palestinian relations in 1986 and in Woolf’s own disturbing comfort with the brutish practice of Empire.

At times, de Kretser’s critical insights are entertainingly well developed. Forty pages from the book’s conclusion, she treats us to a delightfully sophisticated paper titled “Virginia Woolf’s Tea” that explores Woolf’s own attempt at formal innovation in The Years. We are told that Woolf intended that book to be a critical and narrative hybrid, but the project was abandoned in despair. De Kretser’s fictional student suggests the failure of The Years resulted directly from Woolf’s moral failings:

>I contrasted the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea pluckers. The former was made possible by the latter, by the exploitative colonial practices that underwrote British progress and wealth. I told my audience that Woolf had set out to find a fresh form in The Years, but had later abandoned the attempt. A fresh form represents a desire to see the world differently, but Woolf hadn’t managed to do so. The Years remained enclosed in the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it. That was The Story Under The Story in The Years.
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

The narrator’s criticism here is not just character work, as are Selin’s hot takes. She is introducing authentic textual insight, backed by historical research. The trouble is, in this most pivotal instance at least, that the critical text is not actually integrated. De Kretser narrates her paper rather than excerpting it. That was disappointing.

The climax of Either/Or ends up modeling a more seamless integration of the two modes of writing. That book starts with Selin’s confession that skill as an essayist has never translated to imagination. She is inept at inventing stories. But in the book’s conclusion, she turns a fascinating critique of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into compelling narrative:

>Near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Batuman doesn’t present this passage as criticism cum fiction. The literary analysis is fully employed as a storytelling device. The criticism catalyzes character growth. The Idiot and Either/Or are sometimes frustrating in their capacious drift through Selin’s undergraduate experience, but I have no notes on Batuman’s propulsive, criticism-fueled conclusion.

New Forms?

Selin’s epiphany about The Portrait of a Lady turns into a manifesto for her own experience based fiction. She reads James’s preface to that book, which uses the image of a “wind-blown germ” to explain how ideas for stories drift into his life. She decides that she can turn this insight into a new form of fiction:

>Nowhere in the preface did Henry James say why he hadn’t found his own life interesting enough to write about. I tried to remember what I knew about Henry James’s life. I was pretty sure I had read that he was gay. Probably being gay had been illegal, and he had been ashamed. So his problem, like Isabel’s, was that he had been born too soon. That was sad, but it didn’t really change anything. Like, for whatever reason, Henry James had had to do stuff like find a “wind-blown germ” and then forget how he had found it, so he wouldn’t feel like he was stealing. But I was more fortunate. I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

This returns us to our initial inquiry: Has Batuman earned the claim to a new form? Has de Kretser?

I don’t think either author has cleared that bar. Batuman’s use of James and Flaubert in her climactic revelation is riveting narrative with real analytical heft, but the voice is consistent with the narration throughout the two novels. Selin is becoming a more insightful critic, but her form of discussing literature remains that of a storyteller, not an academic. She has not actually changed her mode of writing.

De Kretser’s decision to present a summary of her paper rather than excerpts of it undermines her claim to hybrid prose. I would have preferred it if she had interwoven her critical voice with her narrative voice, similar to the way that A.S. Byatt weaves Victorian poetry into 20th-century narrative in Possession. It is not necessary for the essayistic content to be indistinguishable from the story, the way that Benjamín Labatut’s non-fiction melts invisibly into his fiction. But it seems to me a more original use of critical writing would be for the two forms to be rendered adjacently in their native idioms, not in a character’s voice. Having characters discuss literature is not a new form. Selin knows that; she’s read Proust.

Neither author has created a novel that doesn’t read like a novel or reinvented a centuries-old art form. But the willingness of both authors to merge their own stories with literary insight and narrative imagination makes for three exceptional reading experiences.

A slightly longer version of this essay appears at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-14-de-kretser-batuman/

Brahms in 1889. Photographer unknown. Colorized with Colorize and PaintShopPro (not AI) by DaveD, Tinted History.

If you ask my nonagenarian father what he knows about Johannes Brahms, he can name the lullaby and the three B’s (“Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms”) and nothing else. Probe further and an indistinct association emerges between the fourth grade and the title “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” although Dad seems a bit surprised when I point out that the title belongs to the lullaby guy. And yet, if you flip through my parents’ old LPs, you will encounter numerous Brahms recordings, including a box set of the complete orchestral works that no one knew we had.

I could easily ascribe this to old age, but that doesn’t help me explain my own inability to encode neural connections pertaining to Brahms. I find his music harder to identify and retain than any other classical composer. My ear is untrained, and my youth was devoted to weird pop music jumblings—Russ Taff, Richard Thompson, and Radiohead—but I can hold my own in a game of Name That Composer if the composer is Mozart, Chopin, Sibelius, or Telemann. Not so Brahms. His style never announced itself vigorously enough to grasp my attention, and while I might stay pleasantly adrift in its sonority, any attempt to focus on craft always dissipated with the first available distraction.

So why did I buy Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography? Why did I devote 80 days of my crowded reading life to a book about a composer whose music I neither knew nor enjoyed? Why wasn’t I deterred from my commitment to read it when the publisher’s apparent calculation that an audiobook wouldn’t return their investment consigned the book to weekends-only spurts? Why did I repeatedly decline to skim or scan or chunk or DNF* The Brahms Lullaby, as my brother pointedly nicknamed it the thousandth time he saw the 1.55-pound paperback tumble from my slumbering hands?

^(* DNF = Did Not Finish)

April 6 to May 1 – Promise Made, Order Placed

I keep correcting my brother’s perception that the only reason I kept reading the 636-page compendium was to honor a pledge to a Reddit user who was thinking through one of Swafford’s most intriguing contentions:

>The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering—wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion—is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

The Redditor invited fellow lit fans to evaluate that claim, offering a remarkable one of his own in the process: “I find Brahms and Bach endlessly interesting, engaging, and delightful, and Wagner and Bruckner bore me to tears.” I stared at those words for a beat, my brow furrowed in confounded self-implication.

Brahms? Endlessly delightful? What was I missing?

Even after I’d spun those family recordings of Brahms’s First Symphony, even after I’d clocked it as the piece that clinched Brahms’s reputation atop the Romantic hierarchy virtually overnight, even after I’d read Swafford’s page xxi account of a high school First Symphony performance that permanently transformed him from an aspiring football player into one of classical music’s foremost chroniclers, even then, I still couldn’t pick the climactic fourth movement out of a police lineup.

On Reddit, I pled guilty to Swafford’s indictment but fronted on Brahms: “I enjoy both the Brahms and Wagner ends of the spectrum, but my ear is untrained, and my mind too wanders through the sonority.” When my interlocutor replied with a chipper, less-than-overwhelming endorsement (“I just did a bunch of complaining about the epilogue to the book above, but I do really recommend it in general!”), I unthinkingly jotted the fateful pledge: “I’m looking the Swafford up on ThriftBooks!”

My brother was wrong, of course: yes, I’d promised to check out the biography, but I’m not so scrupulous about keeping internet promises that I’d sacrifice twelve consecutive reading weekends just to keep one. I considered it because I needed to earn another freebie from ThriftBooks’ diabolical rewards program. I ordered it because Swafford came highly recommended as a propulsive music biographer and because his Brahms is a fraction of the length of his Mozart and Beethoven. I cracked it open to get a stronger grasp of Brahms’s place in the larger context of a fascinating era in music history.

If I’m honest, I read it as a frustrated inward dare. If I could read 636 pages on a composer who steadfastly refused to stick in my head and come out the other end just as oblivious to his delights, then I’d have absolute, inarguable confirmation that there was something seriously wrong with me.

May 2 to June 6 – Pages i to 74 – 1833 to 1853

Swafford’s introduction strengthened my resolve to go through with the dubious project. It bubbled with intellectual intrigue. He describes the challenge of researching a recalcitrant subject who deliberately burned his papers to confound would-be biographers. He promises a lively translation of the primary materials that employs anachronistic use of idioms and contractions. He sets up the essential tension in Brahms’s music between respect for the structured formalism of Classical forerunners like Mozart and Haydn and affinity for the emotive Sturm und Drang of Beethoven. He pits traditionalists like Brahms, his mentor Robert Schumann, and his mentee Antonin Dvořák against the envelope-pushing experimentalism of “New Germans” like Johannes’s reviled rival Franz Liszt and the divisive, puts-the-cult-in-culture godhead Richard Wagner. He promises to uncover the authentic soul Brahms hid behind his famously sprouting whiskers, providing his book an alternative title that produced a flattered chuckle from this lapsed German student: Brahms Ohne Bart. “Brahms Without the Beard.”

But having roped me in with a scintillating sales pitch, Swafford’s opening chapters failed to render a captivating portrait of the youthful Brahms. When later chapters referenced the childhood Johannes as “Kreisler,” Brahms’s nickname for his immature self, I didn’t have a clear picture of what that term connoted. Subsequent told-not-shown Swaffordian depictions of Kreisler as strident and irritable made me want to flip back to earlier pages. Maybe Brahms had burned all the evidence of his early character, or maybe I’d nodded off too often, but I felt blindsided: when did you show me that kid?

For the most part, Swafford relates the bildungsroman years like a diarist more interested in jogging his own memory about events than in describing or wrestling with his emotional life. I plodded through these pages, frequently procrastinating with more entertaining diversions like Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin and James Wood’s The Broken Estate.

Brahms Ohne Bart was a cute moniker, but my brother’s seemed more apt.

June 6 to July 17 – Pages 74 to 270 – 1853 to 1862

The moment Robert and Clara Schumann make their entrance, Swafford’s narrative suddenly acquires a pull as inescapable as that of the Sun upon the planets. Around this time, I see a TikTok video in which musicologist Sarah Fritz asks, “Can we all just agree that the most interesting thing about Brahms is Clara Schumann?” To me, her wry observation has the weight of unvarnished truth. It’s such a wrenchingly bizarre love triangle that I can’t help relaying it in bald, unanalyzed plot summary.

The 20-year-old Brahms plays his “Hungarian Dances” on the Schumann family piano, and Robert immediately wants to found a fan club. He takes to the press to declare that Brahms is music’s “John the Baptist”—or maybe Schumann is John the Baptist and Brahms is Christ, it’s not entirely clear. It also reads as possibly sexually fueled overpraise to those who’ve heard Robert make the same claim about a parade of promising nobodies. Wagner and his allies laugh it up, ironically dubbing Brahms “heiligen Johannes (Saint John)."

Schumann’s thin tether to reality snaps and he plummets into the Rhine. Brahms becomes caretaker to Clara, a talented musician in her own right. Usually too cool for school, Brahms falls so hard he can’t stop declaring hopeless adulation for the spouse of his ailing benefactor, who is enduring agonizing hallucinations in a nearby hospital.

In early June, my family watched a DVD of a Covent Garden concert that featured Sting reading Schumann’s letters to Clara. That concert ends with Schumann’s death in the psychiatric hospital, officially of pneumonia, and suggests that Clara spent the rest of her life perpetually pushing the ardent Brahms away because she was worn out emotionally and resolvedly devoted to Robert. I saw that and my momentum with Swafford slackened. If that was how the story resolved itself, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend another 500 pages on a book of which that was the most interesting component.

Swafford, his prose expanding in ambition to meet the unfolding drama, ends up contradicting the Sting depiction. Clara eventually wants to marry Brahms, but his feet turn suddenly frigid. Like most men of his era, Brahms is an amorously doting misogynist. How could he be artistically productive in the same house as a talented woman? He starts sending her distanced remonstrations by post. She has moments of righteous indignation but more often expresses besotted devotion to both his compositions and his penetrating eyes.

Brahms’s ongoing feelings for her as the decades pass are a hot mess of densely knotted contradictions. Clara should be a better mother; he would kill to have a son like Felix. Oh, but by the way he’s openly infatuated with her 16-year-old daughter and won’t let it go until Julie marries years later. At the same time, Clara’s tenacious devotion to Brahms’s art fuels his finest work. When he’s not lecturing her about being too effusive:

>“Art is a republic. … Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul. His ability will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but no consul or emperor.” - Brahms to Clara

Brahms’s admonition that Clara shouldn’t try too hard to sway the “voters” in favor of his sonatas has implications beyond their emotional tug-of-war. Emerging alongside his earnest, unintended torture of his faithful best friend is a sense of Brahms as an equal opportunity showman capable of inhabiting a variety of musical forms. Wagner, a lifelong critic of Brahms, grudgingly acknowledges this quality after their sole meeting: “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.”

“Art is a republic.” Whereas Wagner was dogmatic about his own artistic supremacy, Brahms was an irascible chameleon goading the public: “Who do you want me to be next?”

>[Brahms] spent a fair amount of his time writing commercial dances and a patriotic extravaganza, and piles of the sorts of vocal duets, quartets, and such that were staples of social music-making, Hausmusik, in the nineteenth century. None of this is hackwork, but it was largely written to move off the shelves, and did.

I ask myself: Does this shapeshifting quality explain my inability to identify his music?

But just as I start to feel vindicated, I notice an objectively appreciable upgrade in the quality of his compositions. Brahms goes from “The Hungarian Dances,” lively and toe-tappable but simple, to the First Piano Concerto, with a thunderous Beethovenian opening inspired by Robert Schumann’s suicidal plunge into the Rhine and a soft Chopin-esque declaration of undying love for Schumann’s wife.

I find it so compelling, I shell out $25 to buy a used copy of the concerto in the edition most respected by audiophiles.

July 18 to July 19 – Pages 270 to 636 – 1862 to 1897

If Brahms is a chameleon, he is a progressively more proficient one, and Swafford’s lively writing is matching him note for note. Brahms may have tried to destroy the trail left to biographers, but he clearly overlooked some bangers. Swafford’s pages are increasingly dense with quotations from Brahms that reveal his abrasive humblebrag charm. “The melodies fly so thick here that you have to be careful not to step on one,” he says of his own First Symphony. When told that its last movement bears a strong resemblance to Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms snaps, “Any jackass can see that!”

Meanwhile, my enjoyment of the book expands in ironic lockstep with my impatience with it. In mid-July, I make a determined resolution that this will be my last weekend babysitting Brahms. It’s not even a plausible conviction; I’m only halfway through Swafford’s tome, and I squander Saturday on personal business. Sunday is here, and there are 304 pages left.

Speaking of bangers, Brahms is now churning out the masterpieces that launched him into triune immortality with Bach and Beethoven. Brahms’s fevered output seems motivated by his oft-stated fear that he will end up the Romantic era’s enduringly obscure equivalent of Luigi Cherubini (Medea). There is Ein deutsches Requiem, as secular a requiem as the era could offer, one that the agnostic Brahms defended by saying he not only intentionally left Christ’s name out of it but wanted to replace the word “German” in “A German Requiem” with “human.” There is the Violin Concerto, of which one violinist groused, “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music, but does anyone imagine … that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?” There is the inventive classical riffing of “Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56.” There are the four resplendent symphonies.

These compositions put Brahms in Wagner’s orbit; the two are now the undisputed godheads of the Romantic world. Wagner is going to win, his emotive defiance of structural rules pushing classical music as a whole inexorably toward Modernism. Not even Brahms and Clara can deny the appeal of Wagner’s operas. She grudgingly admits that Lohengrin “is full of romanticism and thrilling situations, so much so indeed that even the musician himself at times forgets the horrible music.” He admires The Ring Cycle while still condemning Tristan und Isolde (“If I look at that in the morning, I’m cross for the rest of the day”). But even as he rises to Wagner’s strata, Brahms is not bold enough to challenge Bayreuth’s maestro on his own playing field. He gives up his lifelong ambition to write his own Fidelio (Beethoven’s sole opera). Once upon a time, Brahms had brainstormed libretto concepts with Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. Now, he jokes away the whole idea. “I am as likely to write an opera as to marry,” he quips.

The complex friendship of Brahms and Clara continues to provide Swafford’s emotional core, but as 5am Sunday turns into 8am Sunday, the music itself becomes the surprising star of the second half. I listen to it as I read Swafford’s mellifluous and cerebral analysis of the latter works. My untrained eyes race with surprising comprehension past pasted chunks of sheet music and fluent technical explications (“The movement ends in almost pure E Phrygian, only with a raised third on the tonic chord for a touch of E major”), nestling into the writerly effusions that finally shed light on beautiful melodies that were previously unattainable to me:

>The piece begins with a searing, anguished adagio, with relentless pounding timpani. That extended introduction, going through several stages, poses the essential “plot” of the First Symphony: call it fate. … It is one of the most spine-tingling beginnings of any symphony, plunging us into a world dark, questioning, shifting, striving toward some indefinable goal. … This is music first sketched in the early 1860s or before; in feel it is the Brahms of the Werther years, the opening of the D Minor Concerto, the passion and frustration of Young Kreisler. Fate! Fate!

As the pages fly by, my resolve strengthens to avoid spending another 80 days on the second half of the book. That would take me to Halloween weekend, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is performing Ein deutsches Requiem, individual tickets not yet on sale. But if my determination keeps me glued to my chair into the afternoon, what keeps my blurry eyes affixed to the pages is Swafford’s fluid prose, and the sudden legibility of Brahms’s musical themes. I don’t claim to have fallen for Brahms like Brahms for Clara. The tally of skipped bars was higher than the tally of skimmed paragraphs. But when 1pm arrives, I breathe a sigh of relief. 304 pages turned today. I have finally sung Brahms his own lullaby.

July 20 – Aftermath

I am currently deciding whether to delay a lakeside vacation in order to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play an outdoor rendition of Brahms’s First Symphony fused with excerpts from Radiohead’s landmark alternative rock album OK Computer, an album I rank among the best of all time. As I listen to a YouTube preview, I find myself humming along with Brahms’s tunes as effortlessly as Thom Yorke’s vocal parts. The familiar words of “Electioneering” now remind me of Brahms, who finally secured my vote in his republic of art.

>I will stop, I will stop at nothin’
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote

Photos from Dreamstime.com

>“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages simply convert you.”
“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian.”
Henry James, The Ambassadors

>*“ If [my father’s] decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.”*Leah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

As a kid, I was perpetually a diminutive apostle-in-training. Dad was a mainline protestant minister and mom was a graduate of the so-called “Harvard of the Evangelicals.” Consequently, many of my birthday and Christmas presents fell into one of two categories. There were James Dobson-esque devotional books jammed with advice on how to talk to unbelievers. And there were catchy Christian LPs that modeled Christlike humility and divinely sanctioned self-aggrandizement in the same unironic breath:

>People smile at me and ask me what it is
That makes them want to be just like I am
So I just point to you and tell them, yes it's true
I'm no special one, I'm just one man
Keith Green, “Because of You”

Sometimes I would role play a witness opportunity in my head, but there was no one to witness to. I went to a suffocatingly small Lutheran grade school where belief in Jesus was as obligatory as German classes. By the time ninth grade unlocked that cage, I couldn’t wait to disappear into the secular anonymity of a 4,000-student high school. There, I finally started meeting kids who lacked the doctrinaire confidence of Martin Luther. My best friends were a Jew and a gay lapsed Catholic. The relief was palpable. Still, my training nagged at the back of my mind. Wasn’t I supposed to be finding a quiet moment to explain that Jesus was the reason they wanted to be just like me?

Even then the notion of persuading others to adopt my most intimate beliefs was completely alien to me. I simply did not have that kind of confidence.

For much of American history, confidence has been this nation’s chief domestic export. That is the mutual subject of The Ambassadors by Henry James and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Written from bookend vantage points on the 20th century’s experiment with American Imperialism (1903 and 1998), the two novels are so different in style and focus that the comparison seemed superficial to me until I noticed that they tell essentially the same story.

True, imperialism is the explicit subject of Kingsolver’s book and merely a hastily mentioned metaphor in James. Her novel is a historical epic covering the shifting power structure of Africa from colonial subservience to violent independence from the perspectives of five distinctly voiced first-person narrators. His is an intensely internalized navigation of individual choice told mostly through dinner party chitchat and obsessively reiterative third-person narration.

But each begins with Americans attempting to impose their confidently held values on older societies that already have fully formed ethical traditions. In both cases, the missionaries are converted by the natives, shattering the evangelical premise. In the end, however, Kingsolver’s heroines redeem epiphany for constructive change while James’s hero achieves the epiphany without actualizing its transformative potential.

Exporting Confidence

Although The Ambassadors is a resolutely apolitical book, it is set at a moment when America’s cultural chauvinism was snowballing toward its first colonial occupations. The period is documented by Empire, the 1987 entry in Gore Vidal’s seven-volume “Narratives of American Empire” historical fiction series. At the outset of that book, President William McKinley is winning the Spanish American War and reluctantly weighing whether to adopt the loser’s Caribbean colonies. Always one to challenge America’s overweening self-image, Vidal casts Henry James himself as the nation’s sesquipedalian conscience. Told in one scene that the world will be worse off if America lets Russia or Germany take over Spain’s colonies, James replies with modest sagacity:

>“What then are WE given to, that is so immeasurably superior? … How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American—and bad, too, let me hasten to add—cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?”

Vidal’s use of James is not tangential to The Ambassadors. Rather, it illuminates the unspoken historical backdrop of its diplomatic mission.

What James explores through metaphor, Kingsolver dramatizes explicitly. The Poisonwood Bible started life as a memoir, with the author looking back on a family trip to Africa. Kingsolver’s father was a doctor, and his mission was medical rather than religious. While living in Africa, the youthful Kingsolver wrote a striking entry in her diary:

>“Even avid, adult news junkies in 1960 would have been hard-pressed to learn how President Eisenhower and the CIA helped remove the newly elected Prime Minister and replace him with a puppet dictator named Mobutu. They did it in secret. That’s how it works.”

The CIA plot to poison duly elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though eventually abandoned, is settled history to the extent that it is documented online by the State Department. Somewhat surprisingly, the incident has never tainted Eisenhower’s positive historical reputation. Eisenhower’s Democratic successor John F. Kennedy encountered political turbulence for the Bay of Pigs not so much because the president had contemplated assassinating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro but because the attempt was sloppy. Many Americans shrugged; that’s what heads of state did at wartime, and this was during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s decidedly undemocratic efforts to promote global democracy opened a new interventionist era in American Imperialism, a label that was applied with ever less frequency.

That promotional mission is the setup of Kingsolver’s novel. She assigns that mission to Nathan Price, an abusively dogmatic Southern Baptist minister who relocates his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to spread Jesus’s love to natives by butchering their native tongue and belittling their traditions. Price is more than a religious emissary, however. Saving the savages from darkness means exposing them to American religious, political, and cultural superiority, for that is Price’s path from primitive confusion to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

The mission in The Ambassadors is narrower, but no less founded on cultural hubris. The offstage villain of The Ambassadors is the puritanical industrialist Mrs. Newsome, who sends Lambert Strether to Paris to preach good old fashioned American judgmentalism to her expat son Chad in the hope that he will take over the family business. Chad’s offense is his rapid assimilation to Old World values. He has been cavorting with an older French woman, and it is bad for business. James never identifies Mrs. Newsome’s exported commodity (American confidence?), but the company’s real estate is described as “a little industrial colony.”

“Savage” Conversions

Pair that colonial language with the quotation that opened this essay, about the French tendency to convert American missionaries to their permissive value system, and you have the controlling metaphor of The Ambassadors. The more Strether sees of Old World life, the more he embraces it.

The novel supports Vidal’s portrayal of James, who moved to Europe early in adulthood, as openly cynical about his birth country’s virtues. Irish author Colm Tóibín, who wrote a fictionalized biography of James (The Master), argues in his introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of The Ambassadors that James wrote the book in part to distance himself from the imperious boosterism of its American characters.

>The idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only pleasure but satisfaction.

Similarly, the Price women soon learn the cost of their cultural chauvinism. The Price women share narrator duties, but the book’s moral heroine is middle daughter Leah Price, who starts as her racist father’s biggest fan but ends up marrying an African.

Leah declares familial independence after Rev. Price’s native congregation casts literal votes to reject Jesus’s authority in their community. “White men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” argues the village chief. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.” Price throws a temper tantrum, citing separation of church and state to invalidate the election in the same breath that he invokes divine authority. “You haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

But though most of the Price women join Leah in her rebellion, Kingsolver provides one notable holdout. If Mrs. Newsome is the calculating presence of capitalism in James’s book, Kingsolver’s Rachel Price, the minister’s eldest daughter, represents the bourgeois consumer who swallows her pitch like Mikey does Life cereal. (“Mikey will like it!”)

Droll but politically and intellectually apathetic, Rachel, who thinks Karl Marx heads the Kremlin, spends the early chapters wringing laughs from memorized American TV commercials. By the end, she sells out body and soul for creature comforts. She becomes the mistress of a murderous ambassador determined to profit from classified knowledge of Eisenhower’s Lumumba plot. When the family moves from Africa to Atlanta, one of the Price girls describes American life as “dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything.”

Dictating Form

The lexicology of each novel reflects its thematic takes on American certainty. Kingsolver’s deftly constructed, melodious prose reflects her confident rejection of American confidence. Each of her five narrators has her own distinct syntactic rhythm, and each seems as accomplished a writer as Kingsolver herself. The careful craft of the prose expresses the author’s thematic and political clarity.

Take this passage, about a flood that disrupts the family garden, narrated by Nathan’s verbally proficient elective mute daughter Adah:

>Our Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire. Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. … Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.

If Nathan is “revising the earth,” changing the story to fit his agenda, Adah is already coming to terms with his belligerent good intentions. She rejects Nathan’s certainty but is unwilling to replace it with a hubristic narrative of her own.

Whereas Kingsolver’s craftsmanship shows that she knows what she believes, James’s proliferating prose embodies his constant caveats. He can’t write a clause without reconsidering it in the clause that follows. In Empire, Vidal lampoons James’s famously snaking, cannibalistic sentences:

>“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; … “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”

“What … what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.
Gore Vidal, Empire: A Novel

Tóibín’s introduction to The Ambassadors argues that it is no coincidence that James’s sentence structure is at its most baroque in this late novel. Although partially a result of the author’s method—he verbally dictated his meandering prose to a secretary—the internal interrogations reflect his predilection for moral ambivalence at a time of American confidence:

>In [James’s] own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.

Another way that the two authors’ form is driven by their content is the arena of storytelling. The novelist E.M. Forster (Howards End) was less than charmed by James’s deferral of narrative excitement to thematic exploration. He argued that, in The Ambassadors, “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.” By this he meant that nothing happens in the book apart from talk.

By contrast, Kingsolver’s plot is a minefield of seismic occurrences. Her story includes floods, covert intelligence on a global scale, and free-roaming lions. Sometimes, the plotting is so eventful as to strain the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, as when not one but two Price daughters are privy to classified information about Eisenhower’s assassination plan. The book’s histrionic emotional climax is the death of Ruth May, the youngest daughter. The emotional weight of her fatal snakebite is undercut by her near proximity to death’s door over numerous preceding chapters, but Kingsolver’s elegiac prose drives home the awful price of Nathan’s original sin. The family should never have come to the Congo.

“But you are here,” Leah’s African groom-to-be had allowed in a prior chapter, “So yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.”

Mistakes Become the Story

In his preface to the novel, James declares The Ambassadors “the best, ‘all round,’ of all my productions” on the grounds that it is the purest expression of its thematic concept. That theme, he says, is expressed when his middle-aged hero rejects caviling puritanism in favor of passionate living: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”

Forster was frustrated by the microscopic scale of this conceit. He claimed James’s characters are “incapable of fun, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income.” If Strether and Gostry had a flesh-and-blood humanity to equal “Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon,” Forster says, James’s book would “burn to ashes” because they would substitute endless cogitation with action.

Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master offers an alternative take. Tóibín’s Henry James is paralyzed by his sensual feelings for men. He spends a night in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s bed but remains chaste. He follows Oscar Wilde’s sodomy trial in strategic silence. He pines after painter Pavel Zhukovsky. In other words, he steadfastly declines to “Live!”

Whether or not James’s sexuality sheds any light on Strether’s narrative arc, the Master ultimately declines to give him a happy ending. In the climactic scene, Strether refuses to pursue a romance with the woman he loves because to do so would be to profit from his ambassadorial project. He decides it is better to be right than to live.

>“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Oh yes—I know.”
“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”
“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”
“To be right?”
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her.
“That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.” …
Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
Henry James, The Ambassadors

The short clipped sentences, after 400 pages of meandering discourse, are striking. So is James’s evident admiration for his hero’s principled refusal. But isn’t Strether repeating the very mistake he lamented so fervently in the passage James identified as the book’s core? At the precipice of manifest destiny’s great expansion, Strether paces a tragically self-imposed cage. This feels like a retreat. His choice is principled, but wrong. Confidence is missteering Strether one last time.

With the historical consequences of confident zeal laid out behind her, Kingsolver can be more generous with her characters’ imperialist “mistakes.” In the penultimate chapter, Adah Price remembers her father’s ministerial declaration that “Tata Jesus is bängala!” The Reverend’s intended meaning is “Jesus is precious,” but his mispronunciation translates to “Jesus is poisonwood.” Adah concludes: “The mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”

The pastor dies in isolation, but the women in his life build familial community around Leah’s burgeoning Black family. Their scars are real, but they will live.

The Bleached Bones of a Christian

America’s plot has experienced an unexpected twist in recent years.

The 44th American president was Jamesian in his capacity for nuanced self-appraisal. Barack Obama was mocked by his opponents for turning foreign visits into “apology tours” that weighed sympathy for American Exceptionalism against the nation’s repeated moral failures. Obama was temperamentally akin to Lambert Strether: “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”

With Donald Trump, American confidence is back. The 47th American president openly threatens to tear open the sutures that were applied during the era covered by Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible. The nation’s chief executive officer, a self-declared “genius,” asserts his nation’s claim on some sovereign nations while enacting Eisenhowerian regime change in others. Strether has been succeeded by Nathan Price.

Throughout high school, I lacked both the confident Faith of my Fathers and the confident doubt of my friends. I told myself that it had been the size of my high school and not its cultural diversity that had made such a positive difference in my life. When the time came to choose a post-collegiate path, I opted for a school as densely populated as my secondary institution and almost as theologically small as my Lutheran grade school. By orientation, I had outgrown my own decision. Dorm devotion culture—with some of my Lutheran school classmates—confirmed that sinking feeling. It took months to find friends who shared my distrust of “Dogs and Devos” (hot dog-fueled Bible study before bed). Sometimes a lesson is so important it bears repetition before we finally learn to live.

^(This is also at) ^(www.septimuscarr.com)

Brahms in 1889. Photographer unknown. Colorized with Colorize and PaintShopPro (not AI) by DaveD, Tinted History.

If you ask my nonagenarian father what he knows about Johannes Brahms, he can name the lullaby and the three B’s (“Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms”) and nothing else. Probe further and an indistinct association emerges between the fourth grade and the title “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” although Dad seems a bit surprised when I point out that the title belongs to the lullaby guy. And yet, if you flip through my parents’ old LPs, you will encounter numerous Brahms recordings, including a box set of the complete orchestral works that no one knew we had.

I could easily ascribe this to old age, but that doesn’t help me explain my own inability to encode neural connections pertaining to Brahms. I find his music harder to identify and retain than any other classical composer. My ear is untrained, and my youth was devoted to weird pop music jumblings—Russ Taff, Richard Thompson, and Radiohead—but I can hold my own in a game of Name That Composer if the composer is Mozart, Chopin, Sibelius, or Telemann. Not so Brahms. His style never announced itself vigorously enough to grasp my attention, and while I might stay pleasantly adrift in its sonority, any attempt to focus on craft always dissipated with the first available distraction.

So why did I buy Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography? Why did I devote 80 days of my crowded reading life to a book about a composer whose music I neither knew nor enjoyed? Why wasn’t I deterred from my commitment to read it when the publisher’s apparent calculation that an audiobook wouldn’t return their investment consigned the book to weekends-only spurts? Why did I repeatedly decline to skim or scan or chunk or DNF* The Brahms Lullaby, as my brother pointedly nicknamed it the thousandth time he saw the 1.55-pound paperback tumble from my slumbering hands?

^(* DNF = Did Not Finish)

April 6 to May 1 – Promise Made, Order Placed

I keep correcting my brother’s perception that the only reason I kept reading the 636-page compendium was to honor a pledge to a Reddit user who was thinking through one of Swafford’s most intriguing contentions:

>The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering—wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion—is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

The Redditor invited fellow lit fans to evaluate that claim, offering a remarkable one of his own in the process: “I find Brahms and Bach endlessly interesting, engaging, and delightful, and Wagner and Bruckner bore me to tears.” I stared at those words for a beat, my brow furrowed in confounded self-implication.

Brahms? Endlessly delightful? What was I missing?

Even after I’d spun those family recordings of Brahms’s First Symphony, even after I’d clocked it as the piece that clinched Brahms’s reputation atop the Romantic hierarchy virtually overnight, even after I’d read Swafford’s page xxi account of a high school First Symphony performance that permanently transformed him from an aspiring football player into one of classical music’s foremost chroniclers, even then, I still couldn’t pick the climactic fourth movement out of a police lineup.

On Reddit, I pled guilty to Swafford’s indictment but fronted on Brahms: “I enjoy both the Brahms and Wagner ends of the spectrum, but my ear is untrained, and my mind too wanders through the sonority.” When my interlocutor replied with a chipper, less-than-overwhelming endorsement (“I just did a bunch of complaining about the epilogue to the book above, but I do really recommend it in general!”), I unthinkingly jotted the fateful pledge: “I’m looking the Swafford up on ThriftBooks!”

My brother was wrong, of course: yes, I’d promised to check out the biography, but I’m not so scrupulous about keeping internet promises that I’d sacrifice twelve consecutive reading weekends just to keep one. I considered it because I needed to earn another freebie from ThriftBooks’ diabolical rewards program. I ordered it because Swafford came highly recommended as a propulsive music biographer and because his Brahms is a fraction of the length of his Mozart and Beethoven. I cracked it open to get a stronger grasp of Brahms’s place in the larger context of a fascinating era in music history.

If I’m honest, I read it as a frustrated inward dare. If I could read 636 pages on a composer who steadfastly refused to stick in my head and come out the other end just as oblivious to his delights, then I’d have absolute, inarguable confirmation that there was something seriously wrong with me.

May 2 to June 6 – Pages i to 74 – 1833 to 1853

Swafford’s introduction strengthened my resolve to go through with the dubious project. It bubbled with intellectual intrigue. He describes the challenge of researching a recalcitrant subject who deliberately burned his papers to confound would-be biographers. He promises a lively translation of the primary materials that employs anachronistic use of idioms and contractions. He sets up the essential tension in Brahms’s music between respect for the structured formalism of Classical forerunners like Mozart and Haydn and affinity for the emotive Sturm und Drang of Beethoven. He pits traditionalists like Brahms, his mentor Robert Schumann, and his mentee Antonin Dvořák against the envelope-pushing experimentalism of “New Germans” like Johannes’s reviled rival Franz Liszt and the divisive, puts-the-cult-in-culture godhead Richard Wagner. He promises to uncover the authentic soul Brahms hid behind his famously sprouting whiskers, providing his book an alternative title that produced a flattered chuckle from this lapsed German student: Brahms Ohne Bart. “Brahms Without the Beard.”

But having roped me in with a scintillating sales pitch, Swafford’s opening chapters failed to render a captivating portrait of the youthful Brahms. When later chapters referenced the childhood Johannes as “Kreisler,” Brahms’s nickname for his immature self, I didn’t have a clear picture of what that term connoted. Subsequent told-not-shown Swaffordian depictions of Kreisler as strident and irritable made me want to flip back to earlier pages. Maybe Brahms had burned all the evidence of his early character, or maybe I’d nodded off too often, but I felt blindsided: when did you show me that kid?

For the most part, Swafford relates the bildungsroman years like a diarist more interested in jogging his own memory about events than in describing or wrestling with his emotional life. I plodded through these pages, frequently procrastinating with more entertaining diversions like Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin and James Wood’s The Broken Estate.

Brahms Ohne Bart was a cute moniker, but my brother’s seemed more apt.

June 6 to July 17 – Pages 74 to 270 – 1853 to 1862

The moment Robert and Clara Schumann make their entrance, Swafford’s narrative suddenly acquires a pull as inescapable as that of the Sun upon the planets. Around this time, I see a TikTok video in which musicologist Sarah Fritz asks, “Can we all just agree that the most interesting thing about Brahms is Clara Schumann?” To me, her wry observation has the weight of unvarnished truth. It’s such a wrenchingly bizarre love triangle that I can’t help relaying it in bald, unanalyzed plot summary.

The 20-year-old Brahms plays his “Hungarian Dances” on the Schumann family piano, and Robert immediately wants to found a fan club. He takes to the press to declare that Brahms is music’s “John the Baptist”—or maybe Schumann is John the Baptist and Brahms is Christ, it’s not entirely clear. It also reads as possibly sexually fueled overpraise to those who’ve heard Robert make the same claim about a parade of promising nobodies. Wagner and his allies laugh it up, ironically dubbing Brahms “heiligen Johannes (Saint John)."

Schumann’s thin tether to reality snaps and he plummets into the Rhine. Brahms becomes caretaker to Clara, a talented musician in her own right. Usually too cool for school, Brahms falls so hard he can’t stop declaring hopeless adulation for the spouse of his ailing benefactor, who is enduring agonizing hallucinations in a nearby hospital.

In early June, my family watched a DVD of a Covent Garden concert that featured Sting reading Schumann’s letters to Clara. That concert ends with Schumann’s death in the psychiatric hospital, officially of pneumonia, and suggests that Clara spent the rest of her life perpetually pushing the ardent Brahms away because she was worn out emotionally and resolvedly devoted to Robert. I saw that and my momentum with Swafford slackened. If that was how the story resolved itself, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend another 500 pages on a book of which that was the most interesting component.

Swafford, his prose expanding in ambition to meet the unfolding drama, ends up contradicting the Sting depiction. Clara eventually wants to marry Brahms, but his feet turn suddenly frigid. Like most men of his era, Brahms is an amorously doting misogynist. How could he be artistically productive in the same house as a talented woman? He starts sending her distanced remonstrations by post. She has moments of righteous indignation but more often expresses besotted devotion to both his compositions and his penetrating eyes.

Brahms’s ongoing feelings for her as the decades pass are a hot mess of densely knotted contradictions. Clara should be a better mother; he would kill to have a son like Felix. Oh, but by the way he’s openly infatuated with her 16-year-old daughter and won’t let it go until Julie marries years later. At the same time, Clara’s tenacious devotion to Brahms’s art fuels his finest work. When he’s not lecturing her about being too effusive:

>“Art is a republic. … Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul. His ability will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but no consul or emperor.” - Brahms to Clara

Brahms’s admonition that Clara shouldn’t try too hard to sway the “voters” in favor of his sonatas has implications beyond their emotional tug-of-war. Emerging alongside his earnest, unintended torture of his faithful best friend is a sense of Brahms as an equal opportunity showman capable of inhabiting a variety of musical forms. Wagner, a lifelong critic of Brahms, grudgingly acknowledges this quality after their sole meeting: “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.”

“Art is a republic.” Whereas Wagner was dogmatic about his own artistic supremacy, Brahms was an irascible chameleon goading the public: “Who do you want me to be next?”

>[Brahms] spent a fair amount of his time writing commercial dances and a patriotic extravaganza, and piles of the sorts of vocal duets, quartets, and such that were staples of social music-making, Hausmusik, in the nineteenth century. None of this is hackwork, but it was largely written to move off the shelves, and did.

I ask myself: Does this shapeshifting quality explain my inability to identify his music?

But just as I start to feel vindicated, I notice an objectively appreciable upgrade in the quality of his compositions. Brahms goes from “The Hungarian Dances,” lively and toe-tappable but simple, to the First Piano Concerto, with a thunderous Beethovenian opening inspired by Robert Schumann’s suicidal plunge into the Rhine and a soft Chopin-esque declaration of undying love for Schumann’s wife.

I find it so compelling, I shell out $25 to buy a used copy of the concerto in the edition most respected by audiophiles.

July 18 to July 19 – Pages 270 to 636 – 1862 to 1897

If Brahms is a chameleon, he is a progressively more proficient one, and Swafford’s lively writing is matching him note for note. Brahms may have tried to destroy the trail left to biographers, but he clearly overlooked some bangers. Swafford’s pages are increasingly dense with quotations from Brahms that reveal his abrasive humblebrag charm. “The melodies fly so thick here that you have to be careful not to step on one,” he says of his own First Symphony. When told that its last movement bears a strong resemblance to Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms snaps, “Any jackass can see that!”

Meanwhile, my enjoyment of the book expands in ironic lockstep with my impatience with it. In mid-July, I make a determined resolution that this will be my last weekend babysitting Brahms. It’s not even a plausible conviction; I’m only halfway through Swafford’s tome, and I squander Saturday on personal business. Sunday is here, and there are 304 pages left.

Speaking of bangers, Brahms is now churning out the masterpieces that launched him into triune immortality with Bach and Beethoven. Brahms’s fevered output seems motivated by his oft-stated fear that he will end up the Romantic era’s enduringly obscure equivalent of Luigi Cherubini (Medea). There is Ein deutsches Requiem, as secular a requiem as the era could offer, one that the agnostic Brahms defended by saying he not only intentionally left Christ’s name out of it but wanted to replace the word “German” in “A German Requiem” with “human.” There is the Violin Concerto, of which one violinist groused, “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music, but does anyone imagine … that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?” There is the inventive classical riffing of “Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56.” There are the four resplendent symphonies.

These compositions put Brahms in Wagner’s orbit; the two are now the undisputed godheads of the Romantic world. Wagner is going to win, his emotive defiance of structural rules pushing classical music as a whole inexorably toward Modernism. Not even Brahms and Clara can deny the appeal of Wagner’s operas. She grudgingly admits that Lohengrin “is full of romanticism and thrilling situations, so much so indeed that even the musician himself at times forgets the horrible music.” He admires The Ring Cycle while still condemning Tristan und Isolde (“If I look at that in the morning, I’m cross for the rest of the day”). But even as he rises to Wagner’s strata, Brahms is not bold enough to challenge Bayreuth’s maestro on his own playing field. He gives up his lifelong ambition to write his own Fidelio (Beethoven’s sole opera). Once upon a time, Brahms had brainstormed libretto concepts with Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. Now, he jokes away the whole idea. “I am as likely to write an opera as to marry,” he quips.

The complex friendship of Brahms and Clara continues to provide Swafford’s emotional core, but as 5am Sunday turns into 8am Sunday, the music itself becomes the surprising star of the second half. I listen to it as I read Swafford’s mellifluous and cerebral analysis of the latter works. My untrained eyes race with surprising comprehension past pasted chunks of sheet music and fluent technical explications (“The movement ends in almost pure E Phrygian, only with a raised third on the tonic chord for a touch of E major”), nestling into the writerly effusions that finally shed light on beautiful melodies that were previously unattainable to me:

>The piece begins with a searing, anguished adagio, with relentless pounding timpani. That extended introduction, going through several stages, poses the essential “plot” of the First Symphony: call it fate. … It is one of the most spine-tingling beginnings of any symphony, plunging us into a world dark, questioning, shifting, striving toward some indefinable goal. … This is music first sketched in the early 1860s or before; in feel it is the Brahms of the Werther years, the opening of the D Minor Concerto, the passion and frustration of Young Kreisler. Fate! Fate!

As the pages fly by, my resolve strengthens to avoid spending another 80 days on the second half of the book. That would take me to Halloween weekend, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is performing Ein deutsches Requiem, individual tickets not yet on sale. But if my determination keeps me glued to my chair into the afternoon, what keeps my blurry eyes affixed to the pages is Swafford’s fluid prose, and the sudden legibility of Brahms’s musical themes. I don’t claim to have fallen for Brahms like Brahms for Clara. The tally of skipped bars was higher than the tally of skimmed paragraphs. But when 1pm arrives, I breathe a sigh of relief. 304 pages turned today. I have finally sung Brahms his own lullaby.

July 20 – Aftermath

I am currently deciding whether to delay a lakeside vacation in order to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play an outdoor rendition of Brahms’s First Symphony fused with excerpts from Radiohead’s landmark alternative rock album OK Computer, an album I rank among the best of all time. As I listen to a YouTube preview, I find myself humming along with Brahms’s tunes as effortlessly as Thom Yorke’s vocal parts. The familiar words of “Electioneering” now remind me of Brahms, who finally secured my vote in his republic of art.

>I will stop, I will stop at nothin’
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote

David Frum is not an expert in English Literature, but like me, he plays one on his blog. A longtime Atlantic contributor, former George W. Bush speechwriter, and critic of the current adminstration, Frum writes culturally fluent, rational content that is never more entertaining than when he applies his unique perspective to classic novels.

Nevertheless, my hackles rose when I came across an undated account of Frum’s attempt to read Romola, George Eliot’s 1862 historical fiction novel about 1492 Florence. After claiming inaccurately that “almost nobody” likes the book, Frum offers this blithe thesis:

>"I got a little more than half way through the book before I finally had to quit, beaten into submission to the majority view: Romola is boring and silly — Eliot’s one grand debacle as a writer."

He DNF'd* it? And then panned it in print?

What follows is a not-entirely-unaltered reproduction of a message I pasted into the Contact form of Frum’s website on February 9, 2026.

OPEN LETTER TO DAVID FRUM

Hi, David.

I greatly enjoyed your now-aging post about George Eliot’s delightful prototypical campaign drama and topsy-turvy melodrama Felix Holt, The Radical a couple of years ago, around the time I read the book myself.

So fun to get a contemporary political commentator’s analysis of a fairly obscure Eliot work. I agree with your assessment that Felix is a satisfying early effort at a Victorian political novel. Certainly, Eliot deserves credit for implicitly asking whether it was “radical” to make “rotten boroughs” (overrepresented voting districts) a little less rotten, or to call out the soft corruption of buying votes with beer. I would argue that any conversation about Victorian novelists who “show the system in action” should cite Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote more than a dozen politically sophisticated novels from an insider’s perspective laced with withering wit and compassionate conservatism. (Your old boss might approve.) But that’s a quibble. Your appreciation of Felix’s institutionally isolated matriarch Mrs. Transome was spot-on. I only wish you’d elaborated on your oblique reference to “the problems of feminism.”

All that said, you blew a wide-open layup in your evaluation of Romola. I get your frustration with the early chapters, in which the book’s semi-monastic titular heroine does echo Felix’s Esther Lyon in succumbing to a love you so aptly framed as “dangerously self-abnegating.” But you fail to acknowledge Romola’s eventual cleareyed emergence on the other side of that love and her efforts to take up arms against it. Tsk tsk. Someone didn’t complete the assignment.

Your declaration that “almost nobody has a good word to say for Romola” is either ignorant or insulting. That “almost” is a black hole of a caveat; it swallows 3,000+ Goodreads users who gave the book a 4 or 5 star rating, this one included. It also envelops no less an authority than Henry James, who called it Eliot’s “most important” work (“the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped”) in an 1866 edition of Atlantic Monthly—yes, David, the publication that punches your meal ticket. James praised Romola’s “elevated morality” and suggested that its artistic merit was commensurate with its success “as a moral argument.” To be fair, it was a mixed review, but James also wrote an 1873 essay that offered similarly bracketed praise for Middlemarch (”[it] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole”), which was recently declared the single greatest offering in the history of the novel by The Guardian. In that piece, James said that both Middlemarch and Romola were "rare masterpieces."

You argue that Romola reads “like a worshipful guidebook.” Okay, so early on Eliot crams her exhaustive historical research into every sentence like Hermione Granger writing an admissions essay for the House of Medici. Okay, so most of her chatty Florentine characters speak a homogenous Renaissance dialect that she likely invented for this project. Okay, so the opening chapters tend to slog along like a Medicean galley through an oil spill in the Arno.

Forget all that. Before long, Eliot’s narrative pot starts boiling. She deftly begins to unfurl one of the most original love triangles in English literature. Eventually, she boldly assigns a leading role to a controversial historical figure, the fascinating friar-cum-politician Girolamo Savonarola. By the time she pits the merits and hazards of Christlike devotion and servitude against the cumulative wisdom of classical antiquity, this supposedly “boring and silly” three-volume adventure holds its own against the bulk of the Victorian canon.

Eliot’s literary calling card is her fine-tuned psychological characterizations, and `Romola has them in spades. That Romola’s two-timing husband Tito Melema, from whose perspective much of the book is told, is an antihero does not make him unique in 19th century literature. But only the progenitor of Middlemarch’s remarkably multidimensional semi-antagonist Edward Casaubon could have rendered Tito with such subtle layers. The book details his gradual decline from an earnest, goodhearted youth to a craven-but-smooth-as-silk Machiavellian sociopolitical overachiever. Eliot forecasts this fall from grace before Tito has even committed a sinful action, reporting that he has “sold his soul to evil” after he merely thinks about his reluctance to rescue his adoptive father from Muslim slavery. (It must be acknowledged here that Eliot’s depiction of so-called “Moslem conquerors” is regrettably far less nuanced than her depiction of nearly every white character in her oeuvre.) But if her early judgment of Tito seems harsh, she is less interested in condemning an evildoer than in sowing the subtle seeds of his undoing. Throughout the book, even as he contemplates murder, plots political assassinations, cheats on his wife, and seduces a childlike girl, Eliot compassionately stresses Tito’s genial nature, kind instincts, and sincere uxorious devotion. There but for grace go all of us, she suggests. She isn’t interested in mustache-twirling villains; she wants to contrast the difficult choices made by Romola with her husband’s persistent unwillingness to depart from the path of least resistance.

As remarkable in Romola as ever is Eliot’s clear-eyed moral wisdom. I’ll admit I was puzzled through much of the novel by the heroine’s, and by extension Eliot’s, obvious admiration for the severe religious zealot Savonarola. The youthful Eliot was willing to sacrifice her father’s love and subject herself to vicious gossip by openly and honestly rejecting foundational Christian doctrine. Moreover, she could not have achieved what she did as an author without the impressive breadth and depth of her reading and education—even in an era when a solid foundation of learning was a requisite of the comfortable classes. So how could Eliot be so generous in her treatment of a politically ambitious monk who willfully destroyed secular art and improbably claimed to have received prophetic visions from God Himself? The answer is that Eliot prioritized Christian compassion for society’s most vulnerable over lavish indulgence in erudition and wealth. She appreciated the way that Savonarola steered Florence away from the depravity of the Medici toward a humanism that she still considered holy even though she had personally shed the trappings of religious belief. By the conclusion, however, Eliot distances herself (and Romola) from Savonarola’s extremism.

You might be tempted, Mr. Frum, to claim vindication when I confess that the last few chapters lack the page-turning adventure of Felix Holt’s climactic electoral riot and trial. Or that Romola offers nothing resembling the beautifully intertwined emotional climaxes of the three major romantic plots in Middlemarch. I’ll admit that I struggled a bit to get through the repetitive final pages of Romola. But a slight reduction in narrative oomph at the finish line hardly negates Eliot’s confident, artful wisdom throughout the race.

By the way, thanks for being a good sport about the preceding playful dressing down. I hope you’ll accept it in the spirit I intend: strongly but jestingly worded trash talk from a minor online literary blogger to a major one whose work he admires.
-------

This letter appears in a longer form at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-12-romola/

*DNF = "Did Not Finish"

The internet tried to warn me off reading A.S. Byatt’s 2000 portrait of the scholar as a young man, The Biographer’s Tale. I had a free book coming from Thriftbooks, and this seemed right up my alley: a disillusioned graduate student of postmodernism pivots to a new career by writing a biography of a biographer. It checked all the right boxes: award-winning author whose masterpiece I had just read? Check. Genre-bending examination of the limitations of biography? Check. Polymathic thematic multitasking? Check. But the consensus of the online cognoscenti was thunderously negative. The New York Times cautioned that it was “a dry, tendentious and thoroughly irritating narrative designed to hammer home a single philosophical point.” The top review on Goodreads thought it “veered from mildly interesting to excruciatingly boring.” The Guardian’s Hermione Lee, who literally wrote the book on Virginia Woolf and Tom Stoppard and ought to appreciate an erudite dissertation on biography, “found the book’s playfulness laborious, its knowing erudition airless and its characters whimsical and unappetizing.” Screw it, I thought, the book is free anyway. I’m going to give it a shot. The risk paid off: The Biographer’s Tale is thrilling in its defiance of literary convention.

THE NEGATIVE: Literary Fifty-two Pickup

Now that I’ve finished The Biographer’s Tale, I understand what provoked all the carping. For much of the novel, Byatt seems determinedly indifferent to narrative niceties such as dramatic arc, character development, and the “show don’t tell” aesthetic that every writer learns in seventh grade. It’s as if Byatt were presenting a solipsistic middle finger to fans who enjoyed the compulsive readability of her 1990 breakout smash Possession. The two novels are alike in their formal innovation and literary/historical erudition. But Possession grounded its intellectual fireworks in page-turning romance and mystery, whereas The Biographer’s Tale doles out fragmented snippets of biographical research scrawled on index cards with all the structural organization of a game of Fifty-two Pickup. Byatt demands that we labor through pages of decontextualized musings on taxonomy and debunked scientific theory without even revealing which historical figures are being referenced.

There may be something to the perception that Byatt deliberately followed her most accessible creation with her least accessible. In a 2001 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Byatt described her difficulties getting Possession published in the United States. One American editor told Byatt, “You have spoiled a fine intrigue with all this excrescent matter, and you must take it all out again.” The publisher only agreed to print 7,000 copies of the original manuscript after it won the British Booker Prize. Within months it sold 17 times that number. Let’s just say Byatt’s bestseller status gave her the freedom to attempt more challenging work.

The genius of Possession is that Byatt not only invented two great Victorian poets but also dared to write examples of their poetry. In contrast, The Biographer’s Tale describes a biographical masterpiece in detail but steadfastly refuses to model good biographical writing. We are treated to mounds of research on the biologist Carl Linnaeus, the statistician Francis Galton, and the playwright Henrik Ibsen—fascinating subjects all—but she never quite brings them to life. She hits the highlights of Linnaeus’s remarkable life: he writes journals exaggerating his adventures in Arctic Lapland, debunks a phony biological specimen, and finds the drowned corpse of his best friend. But she never captures the comically pompous manchild that Jason Roberts rendered so memorably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Every Living Thing. The letters she excerpts between Galton and Charles Darwin are amusing and fascinating, but she only scratches the surface of Galton’s potential as a dramatic subject. She makes shrewd connections between Ibsen’s dramaturgy and Linnaeus’s taxonomy. And she uses the famous personality-as-unraveling-onion soliloquy from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to underscore the futility of biography. But Byatt seems to give short shrift to Ibsen’s story compared to the two scientists, and her rejection of traditional storytelling structure is ironic when juxtaposed with a “Master Builder” renowned for his powerful plotting.

THE AFFIRMATIVE: Research Drudgery as Bildungsroman

However, to moan that The Biographer’s Tale is not as conventional as Possession is to favor formula over ingenuity. Byatt’s bold experimentation with form is exciting if you can get over its lack of comforting familiarity. Her fragmented index cards may not be as immediately entertaining as the literary detective work in Possession, but with a little effort they are just as fascinating and rewarding. The latter book is about research as intellectual joyride. The former is about research as tantalizing drudgery that often leads to dead ends. Both are true. If you expect every day of research to yield long-forgotten love letters, as happens in Possession, you are going to be as sorely disappointed in your academic career as is Phineas Nanson, the protagonist in The Biographer’s Tale. He gives up postmodern literary deconstruction only to get immersed in postmodern biographical deconstruction. His craving for tangible facts is met with the hyperbolic lies of his biographical subjects.

Nor is The Biographer’s Tale without traditional literary pleasures. The final pages blossom into a bildungsroman as compelling as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. Phineas spends most of the book obstinately trying to avoid self-revelation. But that shyness dissolves when he falls in love with two women concurrently: the niece of his favorite biographer and the spitfire apiologist who helps him understand Linnaeus. It is a dual romance (not really a love triangle) that is less familiar (read: formulaic) than the contemporary romance in Possession. Phineas begins the book as the studious author of a paper titled “Personae of female desire in the novels of Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham” and ends it by exploring female desire firsthand.

CLOSING ARGUMENT: Innovation Is Its Own Reward

I was sometimes frustrated and challenged by The Biographer’s Tale, but I found the book richly rewarding when I accepted it on its own terms. I do recommend familiarizing yourself as much as possible with Linnaeus, Ibsen, and Galton before embarking on the journey. I had read Roberts’s book on Linnaeus and almost all of Ibsen’s plays. But more importantly, I recommend keeping an open mind. I am reminded that legendary literary critic Harold Bloom dismissed Toni Morrison’s masterpieces Beloved and Jazz as “top-heavy books with very strong political programs; they’re not aesthetic accomplishments.” Bloom was so convinced of the virtues of the Western canon that he couldn’t recognize genius when he read it. “If you teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing,” Tom Stoppard once wrote, “you end up with a lot of people saying you write well.” This is not to suggest that The Biographer’s Tale scales literary heights as skillfully as peak Morrison or even Possession itself. It is simply to suggest that innovation is sometimes its own reward. I’m grateful for the internet’s caution—better not to be blindsided by the book’s oddness—but I’m far more grateful for Byatt’s boldness.

This is a joint review I wrote of Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles Volume One and Richard Thompson's memoir Beeswing*, looking at how their literary voices square with their songwriting voices.* Spoiler alert: it's long. Thanks for reading as much as you find interesting.

THOMPSON: “It’ll Be Me”

Richard Thompson has always had a knack for rendering entrenched defiance and regret in the sparsely worded lightning flashes that three-minute pop song structure affords.

>“And now you dare mock the Singing Bobby / I’ll find the door, take your bullies off me / A sweeter age it was that loved me well”

His characters tend to be loners baring glimpses of their fiercely guarded souls.

>“As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay / And you wouldn’t want me any other way”

Self-revelation in a Thompson song often comes laced with a rabid bite.

>“I feel so good, I’m gonna make somebody pay tonight / I’m old enough to sin but I’m too young to vote / Society been dragging on the tail of my coat”

Those familiar with these songs likely crack open his first memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975, expecting him to report his early adventures with an acidic, take-no-prisoners wit. But that voice appears so fleetingly amid the book’s blandly detailed reminiscences that I finished the book feeling I had less sense of Thompson’s personality than I had coming in.

DYLAN: “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”

Unlike Thompson, Bob Dylan has never been given to portraiture. His early folk songs, the ones that catapulted him from Midwestern obscurity to a lonely position as the most identifiable singing voice of his generation, seemed to have a single narrator who was old-soul wise, righteously indignant, socially compassionate.

>“Your sons and your daughters / are beyond your command / Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand”

Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, a nondescript title of as-yet-unrealized ambition (we’re still waiting for Volume 2), documents the way that lyrical persona shifted into cagily diffuse verse in his later work.

>“All the people we used to know / They’re an illusion to me now / Some are mathematicians / Some are carpenter’s wives / Don’t know how it all got started / I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives”

What is remarkable about the memoir is that its narrator bears little resemblance to either of those personas but is nonetheless reluctantly, grudgingly candid, as if some unidentified force was pulling the author’s teeth into pained self-revelation.

THOMPSON: “Drifting Through the Days”

To say that Beeswing is stylistically cautious is not to say that it is dull. The book is a breezily enjoyable and informative first try at authorship. Thompson shares recollections like a favorite uncle reflecting on the good old days: charming, well-spoken, chockfull of insights into his era (late sixties into early seventies) and vocation (seemingly effortless but voluminously practiced guitar virtuoso). These are the years in which Thompson co-founded the legendary British folk-rock group Fairport Convention, married and divorced his famous gigging partner Linda Thompson, logged session time and awkward Tube rides with reclusive peer Nick Drake, and snuck a “reprehensible” (his word) peek inside Joni Mitchell’s songwriting notebook. A traditional chronological structure ushers Thompson from a “very shy” suburban kid who found the guitar enabled self-expression that was painful in daily life to a “socially inept” solo artist who writes songs “for pleasure, but also to understand [myself] and decode life.” His thoughts are more coherently articulated then Dylan’s, but the latter’s rough musings contain more diamonds.

DYLAN: “You Wanna Ramble”

To say that Chronicles Volume One is sometimes astonishingly revealing is not to say that it is always fascinating. The prose is plainspoken, sometimes prickly. He almost apologizes for his intelligence. This is not the kind of writing you would expect from a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A large percentage of the book consists of rambling laundry lists of cultural influences. The Russian and French classics he studied while squatting on the couches of intellectual Greenwich Village friends. His vinyl folk heroes, his impressions of meeting them for the first time. Off-Broadway theater experiences. Dragnet and Fibber McGee and Molly. Just when you are nodding into nostalgia-induced slumber, he drops a stunning disclosure: “If I had been a voting man, I would have voted for Kennedy.” “My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of [western star] Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody.” Not a voting man? Goldwater? These are jarring self-descriptions from the writer of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the face of the 1960s hippie protest movement.

THOMPSON: “Saving the Good Stuff for You”

By my count, Beeswing contains only three passages of varying length that feel like risky self-exposure. The first is a heartfelt description of a 1969 touring accident that ended the lives of a bandmate and a girlfriend for whom his feelings were uncomfortably casual. “I had known her for barely two weeks when she died, and I’m not sure I could have let her run our lives much longer,” he writes. “Her death froze our romance in midstream, so for a while it seemed more important than it really was.” The second is an account of his unexpected 1970s conversion to Islam. “I had never thought of myself as an alcoholic, but my consumption had risen as the years went by, and for a year I had been drinking solitarily and secretly,” he confesses. “When I started praying, I gave up drinking immediately—stopped on a sixpence.” The third is a passing anecdote, almost a throwaway, in which he declines an invitation to Paul MCartney’s 26th birthday party. It is 1968, the Beatles are at their artistic zenith, and dissolution is fast approaching. “It shows how much of a musical snob I was at the time that I decided not to go—to me the Beatles were a ‘pop’ band and not to be taken seriously,” he discloses. This is the only glimpse we get of this side of the youthful Thompson: judgmental and arrogant, but stonily principled in his misguided way. When the author expresses a desire to give his younger incarnation “a good shake” and an admonition to “get down there and enjoy himself,” it feels moving but pat and mild. What happened to the snarl that young man drafted into his songs?

DYLAN: “What Good Am I?”

You have to wade through pages of banality to accumulate a meaningful self-portrait of Dylan, and even then the brushwork is prevaricating and elusive. But the questions I was asking about him as I read his testimony bowled me over. My prior impression of Dylan was of a more talented Holden Caulfield, recalcitrant mainly because he detested the phonies he found in the music world and the world at large. Now I found myself asking, is he the biggest phony of all? It was not just the aforementioned voter apathy and conservatism. It was the bald-faced hucksterism. In his account of his Greenwich Village folk-scene origin story, Dylan confesses to having had a hustler’s instinct for self-mythologizing as a marketing strategy. He admits to feeding a record label PR executive a biography that was “pure hokum—hophead talk. I hadn’t come in on a freight train at all. What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan.” In the same paragraph, Dylan embodies Caulfield values and embraces his own phoniness. “It wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up,” Dylan writes with his Holden hat on. “I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick.” But one sentence later, Mr. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” denies that song’s entire premise like Peter before the rooster crows:

>I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, that was all well and good.

Much of the book describes Dylan’s struggle to escape the political shadow he’d cast. “Joan Baez recorded a protest song about me that was getting big play,” he reports in chapter three. “[She was] challenging me to get with it—come out and take charge, lead the masses—be an advocate, lead the crusade.” He tries to tell The New York Times that he had never been a spokesman for any cause. The paper runs the interview with the headline, “Spokesman Denies That He’s a Spokesman.” Dylan treats these pressures as external, presenting himself as a humble, misunderstood musician. This feels like a small copout to me. He’d adopted Woody Guthrie’s agenda. He’d sung protests songs with Baez. He’d opened for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Was that too “pure hokum”?

THOMPSON: “Keep Your Distance”

Even after his most vulnerable passages, Thompson the memoirist pokes his head back into its tortoise shell when it comes time to address his life’s most painful experiences. For example, the wrenching dissolution of his relationship with wife and folk duo partner Linda Thompson is reduced to a tepid disclosure: “We emerged as substantially different people, and I am guilty of falling out of love with Linda and wanting to end it.” Two paragraphs down, Richard races through a confession that he neglected his firstborn:

>Linda and I had three kids—Kamila was born in 1982—and we felt overwhelmed at the time, but I should never have neglected Jesse; it was immature and irresponsible. We get on well now—as I do with all five of my talented children and six grandchildren.

Trim a few words and it reads like a family Christmas letter. It’s not that Thompson owes his audience “salt for the memory, black for the years, black as forever, mascara tears,” but the emotional breech between the Christmas letter confession and the Thompson lyrics I just quoted could swallow the British Isles.

DYLAN: “Things Have Changed”

Chronicles skips over the peak of Dylan’s fame, focusing instead on its sepia-toned Gaslight Café prelude and its agonizing paparazzi aftermath. The book’s ellipsis is bridged in my Gen X imagination by “The Lamenting of the 12-Bar Blues,” an old Dylan-inspired folk bootleg performed by Luka Bloom, a favorite Irish folkie of mine. The song depicts a trad troubadour who refuses to accede to constant requests for covers of “the most famous singer in the world:”

>No, no a thousand times no
I’d rather see my life’s blood spillin’
I’ll sing anything
Even God Save the King
But I won’t sing any Bob Dylan

Finally, after a girlfriend threatens to withhold sex, the singer gives in: “I tore off my coat / and ruptured my throat / and I sang just like Bob Dylan.” That iconic unpolished raspy twang. For many, it was the only thing they knew about Dylan. That was true of my parents, who found the voice alienating, harsh, and unmelodic. Still, a 1963 pressing of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sat mystifyingly adjacent to Meet the Beatles in my mother’s otherwise exclusively classical LP collection. “There was a time when I hosted parties,” she explained with mild irritation. The strangulated strangeness of that voice was like a guarantee of authenticity that lent it Woody Guthrie authority. Is it possible that it was a put-on?

In chapter four, Dylan is touring with Tom Petty. The man who’d opened for MLK is now shilling for Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Dylan is so sick of his own songs, they hardly escape his throat. They just don’t feel authentic. But when Dylan picks up a new “vocal technique” from an aging jazz singer, his prose suddenly takes on a vivid immediacy.

>At first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood-choked coughing grunt and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, but it bypassed my brain…. Now I knew I could perform any of these songs without having to be restricted to the world of words.

At some point in Dylan’s recorded catalogue, his voice acquires a different rasp than one that made him famous. Is that the “vocal technique” he describes so pointedly in the memoir? The inauthentic voice he could no longer perform—was that also an adopted “vocal technique”? Was the voice that inspired the Vietnam protests and Woodstock a phony character voice? A bit of hustler hokum?

DYLAN AND THOMPSON: “I Contain Multitudes”

When I finally scratched “Dylan concert” off my bucket list on November 17, 2021, he did not make an effort to convince me of his authenticity. The octogenarian plowed indefatigably through his new record, Rough and Rowdy Ways, mustering only one tossed off grudging pleasantry at the end of the evening, as if we were pulling teeth. Instead he let sharp new compositions like “I Contain Multitudes” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” do the talking.

>"You won’t amount too much, the people all said / ‘Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head / Never pandered, never acted proud / Never took off my shoes, throw ’em in the crowd"

Coincidentally, I’d seen Richard Thompson two weeks earlier, witty and gracious as always and evidently more invested in reading excerpts from the memoir than in logging another fleet, fretboard-traversing “Valerie” solo. We applauded the latter, but he waved us off peremptorily. “Please don’t. It’s too easy.”

Judging from Chronicles Volume One, none of it comes easy to Dylan. Those anguished paragraphs about the songs that refused to escape his larynx because they no longer felt true: Most people just sing. Despite the huckster instinct, Dylan’s commitment to truth bleeds from his lyrics.

>"I’ll keep the path open - the path in my mind / I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind / I play Beethoven sonatas Chopin’s preludes . . . I contain multitudes"

Maybe the singing voice was real; maybe it wasn’t. His mind is unimpeachable. When I juxtapose his autobiography with the plain honesty of his songs, I realize that the book never casts him in grandiose inflation. It merely reports his hustler tendencies openly, unapologetically, and without the whiff of settled platitude that dominates Beeswing.

This is a joint review I wrote of Dylan's memoir Chronicles Volume One and Richard Thompson's memoir Beeswing. Spoiler alert: it's long. Thanks for reading as much as you find interesting. You can also read it on my blog.

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THOMPSON: “It’ll Be Me”

Richard Thompson has always had a knack for rendering entrenched defiance and regret in the sparsely worded lightning flashes that three-minute pop song structure affords.

>“And now you dare mock the Singing Bobby / I’ll find the door, take your bullies off me / A sweeter age it was that loved me well”

His characters tend to be loners baring glimpses of their fiercely guarded souls.

>“As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay / And you wouldn’t want me any other way”

Self-revelation in a Thompson song often comes laced with a rabid bite.

>“I feel so good, I’m gonna make somebody pay tonight / I’m old enough to sin but I’m too young to vote / Society been dragging on the tail of my coat”

Those familiar with these songs likely crack open his first memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975, expecting him to report his early adventures with an acidic, take-no-prisoners wit. But that voice appears so fleetingly amid the book’s blandly detailed reminiscences that I finished the book feeling I had less sense of Thompson’s personality than I had coming in.

DYLAN: “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”

Unlike Thompson, Bob Dylan has never been given to portraiture. His early folk songs, the ones that catapulted him from Midwestern obscurity to a lonely position as the most identifiable singing voice of his generation, seemed to have a single narrator who was old-soul wise, righteously indignant, socially compassionate.

>“Your sons and your daughters / are beyond your command / Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand”

Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, a nondescript title of as-yet-unrealized ambition (we’re still waiting for Volume 2), documents the way that lyrical persona shifted into cagily diffuse verse in his later work.

>“All the people we used to know / They’re an illusion to me now / Some are mathematicians / Some are carpenter’s wives / Don’t know how it all got started / I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives”

What is remarkable about the memoir is that its narrator bears little resemblance to either of those personas but is nonetheless reluctantly, grudgingly candid, as if some unidentified force was pulling the author’s teeth into pained self-revelation.

THOMPSON: “Drifting Through the Days”

To say that Beeswing is stylistically cautious is not to say that it is dull. The book is a breezily enjoyable and informative first try at authorship. Thompson shares recollections like a favorite uncle reflecting on the good old days: charming, well-spoken, chockfull of insights into his era (late sixties into early seventies) and vocation (seemingly effortless but voluminously practiced guitar virtuoso). These are the years in which Thompson co-founded the legendary British folk-rock group Fairport Convention, married and divorced his famous gigging partner Linda Thompson, logged session time and awkward Tube rides with reclusive peer Nick Drake, and snuck a “reprehensible” (his word) peek inside Joni Mitchell’s songwriting notebook. A traditional chronological structure ushers Thompson from a “very shy” suburban kid who found the guitar enabled self-expression that was painful in daily life to a “socially inept” solo artist who writes songs “for pleasure, but also to understand [myself] and decode life.” His thoughts are more coherently articulated then Dylan’s, but the latter’s rough musings contain more diamonds.

DYLAN: “You Wanna Ramble”

To say that Chronicles Volume One is sometimes astonishingly revealing is not to say that it is always fascinating. The prose is plainspoken, sometimes prickly. He almost apologizes for his intelligence. This is not the kind of writing you would expect from a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A large percentage of the book consists of rambling laundry lists of cultural influences. The Russian and French classics he studied while squatting on the couches of intellectual Greenwich Village friends. His vinyl folk heroes, his impressions of meeting them for the first time. Off-Broadway theater experiences. Dragnet and Fibber McGee and Molly. Just when you are nodding into nostalgia-induced slumber, he drops a stunning disclosure: “If I had been a voting man, I would have voted for Kennedy.” “My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of [western star] Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody.” Not a voting man? Goldwater? These are jarring self-descriptions from the writer of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the face of the 1960s hippie protest movement.

THOMPSON: “Saving the Good Stuff for You”

By my count, Beeswing contains only three passages of varying length that feel like risky self-exposure. The first is a heartfelt description of a 1969 touring accident that ended the lives of a bandmate and a girlfriend for whom his feelings were uncomfortably casual. “I had known her for barely two weeks when she died, and I’m not sure I could have let her run our lives much longer,” he writes. “Her death froze our romance in midstream, so for a while it seemed more important than it really was.” The second is an account of his unexpected 1970s conversion to Islam. “I had never thought of myself as an alcoholic, but my consumption had risen as the years went by, and for a year I had been drinking solitarily and secretly,” he confesses. “When I started praying, I gave up drinking immediately—stopped on a sixpence.” The third is a passing anecdote, almost a throwaway, in which he declines an invitation to Paul MCartney’s 26th birthday party. It is 1968, the Beatles are at their artistic zenith, and dissolution is fast approaching. “It shows how much of a musical snob I was at the time that I decided not to go—to me the Beatles were a ‘pop’ band and not to be taken seriously,” he discloses. This is the only glimpse we get of this side of the youthful Thompson: judgmental and arrogant, but stonily principled in his misguided way. When the author expresses a desire to give his younger incarnation “a good shake” and an admonition to “get down there and enjoy himself,” it feels moving but pat and mild. What happened to the snarl that young man drafted into his songs?

DYLAN: “What Good Am I?”

You have to wade through pages of banality to accumulate a meaningful self-portrait of Dylan, and even then the brushwork is prevaricating and elusive. But the questions I was asking about him as I read his testimony bowled me over. My prior impression of Dylan was of a more talented Holden Caulfield, recalcitrant mainly because he detested the phonies he found in the music world and the world at large. Now I found myself asking, is he the biggest phony of all? It was not just the aforementioned voter apathy and conservatism. It was the bald-faced hucksterism. In his account of his Greenwich Village folk-scene origin story, Dylan confesses to having had a hustler’s instinct for self-mythologizing as a marketing strategy. He admits to feeding a record label PR executive a biography that was “pure hokum—hophead talk. I hadn’t come in on a freight train at all. What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan.” In the same paragraph, Dylan embodies Caulfield values and embraces his own phoniness. “It wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up,” Dylan writes with his Holden hat on. “I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick.” But one sentence later, Mr. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” denies that song’s entire premise like Peter before the rooster crows:

>I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, that was all well and good.

Much of the book describes Dylan’s struggle to escape the political shadow he’d cast. “Joan Baez recorded a protest song about me that was getting big play,” he reports in chapter three. “[She was] challenging me to get with it—come out and take charge, lead the masses—be an advocate, lead the crusade.” He tries to tell The New York Times that he had never been a spokesman for any cause. The paper runs the interview with the headline, “Spokesman Denies That He’s a Spokesman.” Dylan treats these pressures as external, presenting himself as a humble, misunderstood musician. This feels like a small copout to me. He’d adopted Woody Guthrie’s agenda. He’d sung protests songs with Baez. He’d opened for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Was that too “pure hokum”?

THOMPSON: “Keep Your Distance”

Even after his most vulnerable passages, Thompson the memoirist pokes his head back into its tortoise shell when it comes time to address his life’s most painful experiences. For example, the wrenching dissolution of his relationship with wife and folk duo partner Linda Thompson is reduced to a tepid disclosure: “We emerged as substantially different people, and I am guilty of falling out of love with Linda and wanting to end it.” Two paragraphs down, Richard races through a confession that he neglected his firstborn:

>Linda and I had three kids—Kamila was born in 1982—and we felt overwhelmed at the time, but I should never have neglected Jesse; it was immature and irresponsible. We get on well now—as I do with all five of my talented children and six grandchildren.

Trim a few words and it reads like a family Christmas letter. It’s not that Thompson owes his audience “salt for the memory, black for the years, black as forever, mascara tears,” but the emotional breech between the Christmas letter confession and the Thompson lyrics I just quoted could swallow the British Isles.

DYLAN: “Things Have Changed”

Chronicles skips over the peak of Dylan’s fame, focusing instead on its sepia-toned Gaslight Café prelude and its agonizing paparazzi aftermath. The book’s ellipsis is bridged in my Gen X imagination by “The Lamenting of the 12-Bar Blues,” an old Dylan-inspired folk bootleg performed by Luka Bloom, a favorite Irish folkie of mine. The song depicts a trad troubadour who refuses to accede to constant requests for covers of “the most famous singer in the world:”

>No, no a thousand times no
I’d rather see my life’s blood spillin’
I’ll sing anything
Even God Save the King
But I won’t sing any Bob Dylan

Finally, after a girlfriend threatens to withhold sex, the singer gives in: “I tore off my coat / and ruptured my throat / and I sang just like Bob Dylan.” That iconic unpolished raspy twang. For many, it was the only thing they knew about Dylan. That was true of my parents, who found the voice alienating, harsh, and unmelodic. Still, a 1963 pressing of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sat mystifyingly adjacent to Meet the Beatles in my mother’s otherwise exclusively classical LP collection. “There was a time when I hosted parties,” she explained with mild irritation. The strangulated strangeness of that voice was like a guarantee of authenticity that lent it Woody Guthrie authority. Is it possible that it was a put-on?

In chapter four, Dylan is touring with Tom Petty. The man who’d opened for MLK is now shilling for Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Dylan is so sick of his own songs, they hardly escape his throat. They just don’t feel authentic. But when Dylan picks up a new “vocal technique” from an aging jazz singer, his prose suddenly takes on a vivid immediacy.

>At first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood-choked coughing grunt and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, but it bypassed my brain…. Now I knew I could perform any of these songs without having to be restricted to the world of words.

At some point in Dylan’s recorded catalogue, his voice acquires a different rasp than one that made him famous. Is that the “vocal technique” he describes so pointedly in the memoir? The inauthentic voice he could no longer perform—was that also an adopted “vocal technique”? Was the voice that inspired the Vietnam protests and Woodstock a phony character voice? A bit of hustler hokum?

DYLAN AND THOMPSON: “I Contain Multitudes”

When I finally scratched “Dylan concert” off my bucket list on November 17, 2021, he did not make an effort to convince me of his authenticity. The octogenarian plowed indefatigably through his new record, Rough and Rowdy Ways, mustering only one tossed off grudging pleasantry at the end of the evening, as if we were pulling teeth. Instead he let sharp new compositions like “I Contain Multitudes” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” do the talking.

>"You won’t amount too much, the people all said / ‘Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head / Never pandered, never acted proud / Never took off my shoes, throw ’em in the crowd"

Coincidentally, I’d seen Richard Thompson two weeks earlier, witty and gracious as always and evidently more invested in reading excerpts from the memoir than in logging another fleet, fretboard-traversing “Valerie” solo. We applauded the latter, but he waved us off peremptorily. “Please don’t. It’s too easy.”

Judging from Chronicles Volume One, none of it comes easy to Dylan. Those anguished paragraphs about the songs that refused to escape his larynx because they no longer felt true: Most people just sing. Despite the huckster instinct, Dylan’s commitment to truth bleeds from his lyrics.

>"I’ll keep the path open - the path in my mind / I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind / I play Beethoven sonatas Chopin’s preludes . . . I contain multitudes"

Maybe the singing voice was real; maybe it wasn’t. His mind is unimpeachable. When I juxtapose his autobiography with the plain honesty of his songs, I realize that the book never casts him in grandiose inflation. It merely reports his hustler tendencies openly, unapologetically, and without the whiff of settled platitude that dominates Beeswing.

I read Nick Hornby's odd essay book comparing Charles Dickens and Prince ("Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius"). Despite my casual admiration for both artists, I found Hornby to be its most interesting character. Took me back to the days when I read everything he published. At about the same time I read Michael Frayn's send-up of the dysfunctional relationship between writers and critics, The Trick of It." The two writers started dialoging with each other in my head about the ways that artistic appreciation can be mistaken for artistic expression. Hornby's regular blokes, particularly in "High Fidelity" and "Juilet, Naked," tend to carry a certain swagger about their proficiency as artistic consumers. Frayn's self-congratulatory academic openly questions whether studying literature is harder than writing it. Attached are my elaborations on the subject. I wondered if TrueLitters might have thoughts to share as well.

I picked up Alexander Chee’s exhilaratingly over-the-top historical fiction melodrama The Queen of the Night to revel in 19^(th)-century opera lore. I know I’m late to the party, but when the book dropped in 2016, I didn’t know a mezzosoprano from a heldentenor. It wasn’t until the pandemic years that the subject held much interest for me. My brother was once as opera-ignorant as I was but he’d become so fluent in bel canto and opera buffa that those sheltering in place with him were soon infected with a rapidly metastasizing cultural virus. Before 2020, I had never sat through a full-length opera. Six years later, I’ve seen almost all of the established canon via 24 live performances at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, three at the Met in New York, 19 at other regional theaters or concert halls, 34 in movie theaters, and at least 20 through streaming services and physical media. So let’s just say I came to Chee all in for thematic and narrative intersections with sung-through dramas from Aida to Zelmira. On the other hand, I did not come expecting the nuance of psychology, thought, and expression that is the hallmark of great literature. For the most part, The Queen of the Night aligns with my expectations. It is as self-indulgent as my reasons for reading it and as grand and silly as most 19^(th)-century libretti. Still, there is a certain gravity to the book, derived from the way the broadly shifting fortunes of its heroine—from frontier orphan to kept woman to pampered superstar—reflect the broader condition of women in the historical period it explores.

NOT JUST OPERA

This, I think, is the reason Chee exercises more restraint in his celebration of the operatic artform than I’d anticipated. For most of the novel, he plays hard-to-get with his target audience, teasingly doling out the operatic allusions here and there for roughly the first 400 of 549 pages. Only then does the heroine and narrator, soprano Lilliet Berne, land a breakthrough role in Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula that permits the author to rev up his operatic engines at last. Prior to that, his mode is that of a more traditional purveyor of historical fiction. Chee opens with a mouthwatering fanfic morsel: risotto night at the home of maestro Giuseppe Verdi. But Chee soon flashes back to her origins as a dutifully churched orphan girl raised on Iroquois land in Civil War-era Minnesota. From there, she runs away and joins le cirque in Paris, voluntarily signs up for grisette duty, is purchased as a courtesan by a patriarchal villain known only as “the Tenor,” scores a gig as a servant to Empress Eugénie de Montijo during France’s Second Empire, and shacks up with a Chopin-esque composer of piano nocturnes during the ensuing Siege of Paris. Not too long after that, she ascends at last to the pinnacle of the diva hierarchy.

A PERSONAL VENN DIAGRAM

The long opera-less swaths surprised me, but not as much as the way The Queen of the Night intersected with so many other books I’ve read or plan to read this year. This took me back to junior high, my brief but intense comic book period, when the most thrilling of all literary concepts was the Marvel/DC crossover: Superman meets Spider-Man! The X-Men tussle with the Teen Titans! The Queen of the Night has that kind of cross-pollinated energy. The depiction of Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire echoed an Émile Zola novel I’d just read (The Fortune of the Rougons) and another on my To Be Read list (Mysteries of the Court of Louis Napoleon). Additionally, Lilliet vacations in Baden-Baden, where she meets Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose Fathers and Sons sits on my TBR shelf, and German composer Johannes Brahms, the subject of a Jan Swafford biography I’m working my way through. At one point, I got confused about which book detailed an opera-writing brainstorming session between Brahms and Turgenev. (It was Swafford.) I also started to feel relief that opera characters die in such perfunctory abundance. The comic book characters died a lot too (Superman, Jean Grey, the Flash), but it always turned out to be a marketing gambit. At least opera corpses don’t pop back up after the stretta is over.

FOLLOWING THE E19 MODEL

Chee’s plot is sprawling and digressive, but it loosely follows the narrative structure that critic Conrad L. Osborne claimed was common to all but two operas in the “Extended Nineteenth Century” (that is, extended to include Mozart and Strauss). That structure, explained in Osborne’s massive critical tome Opera as Opera, is essentially this: a protagonist (usually male, but reversed here) who lacks the social standing she desires (a courtesan and royal servant rather than an opera star) falls obsessively in love with a reciprocating lover (the aforementioned composer) who occupies the social position (professional musician) she aspires to. Their union is opposed by high-ranking antagonists (the Empress and the Tenor) with romantic designs on the lovers, generating a love triangle (more of a quadrangle in this case). There is a clash, and one or both lovers die.

FACH AS DESTINY

For obvious reasons, I won’t reveal how closely the novel maps to the E19 on this last point but suffice to say that Lilliet is haunted from the opening chapters by an oppressive sense of encroaching Fate. Chee is at his most clumsily melodramatic when he identifies this destiny as Lilliet’s “curse” and at his most arcanely clever when he associates it with her indelibly fixed type as a singer. This type is known in German opera lingo as a fach, a term that pinpoints a singer’s vocal characteristics at a more granular level than terms like “contralto” or “mezzo.” Lilliet defines fach as follows.

>It is a singer’s fate, for it describes the singer’s range and the type of roles the singer will sing. Some soprano tones are associated with virtue, others with seduction, others with grief. If your voice is a collection of the highest notes, you are to play the good girl. If your voice reaches only to the near heights, you are the spurned one or the dishonored. A bit lower and you are the rival or the seductress, and still lower, the maid or matron…. Mine was a voice that sounded at first as if it did not have the capacity for high notes, until they emerged, surprising, with great force. A voice for expressing sorrow, fear, and despair. The tragic soprano is what I was called, also known as a Falcon.

Lilliet’s fate is determined as inescapably by society, class, and gender as by her fach. She spends the whole novel trying to free herself from constraints imposed by authority figures. As a tyke, Lilliet is prevented from realizing her staggering potential when her devout mother tries to curb her emerging pride by gagging her singing voice. In Europe, she voluntarily signs a sex worker registry to help a prostitute friend. On most pages, she is desperately plotting an escape from the contract that ties her to the doting but abusive Tenor. She escapes him and finds love with the composer, but her aristocratic mistress steps in and ships her back to servitude. Lilliet’s laundry list of socially degraded roles gives her an implausibly Zelig-like ubiquity in the salient events of the era. But realism is not Chee’s priority, and he quietly employs her breadth of experience to establish her as a 19^(th) century Everywoman. Lilliet is addressing more than just opera convention when she asks, “Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?” The question bears thematic weight when applied to women in general.

CAN’T LIVE WITH ‘EM, CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT ‘EM

As a genre, opera alternates between gynolatry and misogyny. From the bel canto era on, sopranos have always been the unquestioned stars of the show. Early 19^(th) century composers like Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, and Gaetano Donizetti deployed coloratura sopranos like Fourth of July firework displays; the feminine arias were the dazzlingly virtuosic main event of the evening. Men could only win arias of equal power by literally emasculating themselves, as did the castrati, to preserve their girlish youthful voices. Rossini was denigrated by critics just for assigning arias to bass voices at all. Yet for all that upper register idolatry, the female characters in operas were consistently and brutally victimized. “Dead women,” wrote Catherine Clément in her 1989 book Opera, or the Undoing of Women, “But no matter how hard I laugh there is always this constant: death by a man.” She proceeds to catalog opera’s female casualties: Nine knifings, three incinerations, two fatal jumpers, two consumptives, and so on. It is a crushing compilation, one that Lilliet knows well, and she consciously strives to stay off the list.

L’AMOUR LA MORT

Death, and its equally momentous abstract partner, love, are the foundation upon which opera is built. Wagner united the two in the immortal compound word, Liebestod. In the novel, Chee points out that the juxtaposition is not unique to German opera: “L’amour, la mort, [Carmen] sings [in the Habenera], by turns gaily and seductively. Love, death. Love. Only in French do they rhyme.” This is what gives so many opera libretti their visceral emotional power and also what makes them sometimes feel overweening and gaudy. Operas do not draw their artistic seriousness from their words but from their glorious music. The music elevates the maudlin earnestness of operatic scripts to an intangible poetry of universal power. In emulating the overreach of opera, Chee harnesses some of that raw artistic heft, but he cannot reproduce it. His prose is skilled and sometimes ambitious, but it is not a substitute for the kinetic polyphony of a Rossini quartet or the blustery innovation of a Wagner interlude. To those untutored on opera’s finer points by their brothers, or any surrogate thereof, The Queen of the Night may read as pseudohistorical schlock. But to those ripe for the indulgence, it is a sustained high C.

My first exposure to Virginia Woolf’s first novel was an excerpt read for a work assignment: a young Edwardian girl drifting mentally and physically in the opening days of a lengthy maritime journey. So when I committed to reading the whole novel two years later, I expected to spend the whole novel bobbing through the waves. I’d been had. The boating expedition ostensibly referenced in the title, The Voyage Out, ends a quarter of the way through the 437-page narrative, and its characters remain landlocked for the duration. Woolf was more interested in an experience at once more particular and more universal: the voyage out of the self and into relationship with others. Woolf portrays this voyage as perilous and its destination as enticing but ultimately inaccessible.

This focus on the unattainability of authentic human connection is in part a critique of Edwardian English society. The book’s protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, is a 24-year-old woman with the life experience and comprehension of an early adolescent. While she has been exposed to certain touchstones of European culture, such as Shakespeare, Austen, and Wagner, her guardians and educators—primarily men—are more interested in protecting her from the details of life they consider sordid than in preparing her for adulthood. She observes the emotional incompetence of her elders and instinctively finds her inherited culture absurd, preferring to withdraw into the comfortingly nonverbal realm of classical music. She complains that “nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt,” while intuiting that reality itself is defined by “what one saw and felt but did not talk about.”

Rachel’s perspective is echoed by her love interest, an aspiring novelist whose latest effort is titled Silence, or the Things People Don’t Say. This young author, Terence Hewet, proves a spiritual match for Rachel despite their seeming inability to surmount the communicative inhibitions that plague their fellow countrymen. Their mutual attraction fuels chapters of unacknowledged obsession, plunging Rachel into manic depressive cycles that probably reflect those famously experienced by Woolf herself. Even after Rachel and Terence finally unite as a couple, their attempts to connect meaningfully alternate between euphoria and futility. The relationship is only consummated through conversation. When they stop talking, their feeling of connection is painfully interrupted: “They remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and the next moment separate and far away again.”

This thematic emphasis on the importance of genuine human communion might be familiar to readers of Woolf’s friend and fellow Edwardian bard, E.M. Forster. His dictum “Only Connect” was a central theme of his masterpieces Howards End, in which emotionally fluent middle-class women struggle to comprehend stunted upper-crust men, and A Passage to India, in which British verbal acumen is reduced to nonsense during a visit to India’s Marabar Caves. Forster was a fan of The Voyage Out (“here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights), though he rightly observed that Woolf's four leading characters lacked the psychological complexity achieved by a Dostoyevsky. Rachel’s characterization, for example, is convincing enough but the reader never quite escapes the sense that she is as much symbol as flesh-and-blood human.

Symbolism also trumps humanity in Woolf’s romanticized depiction of South American natives, who are nevertheless described with uncomfortable frequency as “savages.” Woolf never actually visited South America, a fact Forster probably knew when he praised her for creating “a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis.” For Woolf, the natives are not so much people as foils for her English characters’ difficulty with authentic communication. On a journey into an unspecified jungle, her narrator tells us that the British “felt themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people” from whom the hapless Europeans are “removed … far, far beyond the plunge of speech.”

However, if Woolf’s character development is not beyond critique, her creations movingly convey the modern individual’s longing for and lack of access to meaningful connection. As if drawn from the dusty attic family photo albums of Nick Hornby characters, they substitute shared appreciation of art and literature for intimacy. This results in some delightful exchanges and allusions, particularly from the acerbic St John Hirst, who was reportedly inspired by the author Lytton Strachey, and Clarissa Dalloway, whose engaging discussions of art and literature, of course, later inspired a Woolf novel of her own. Mrs. Dalloway is of course a far braver and more fully realized replica of human thought than The Voyage Out, but I liked Clarissa better on the boat. Less obsessive social butterfly, more posh culture analyst. The connective tissue is the pained communicative distance in both novels. In the debut, she is obliviously charming while her husband impulsively two-times her. In the celebrated pseudo-sequel, she stifles inchoate longing for her female almost-crush.

Ultimately, The Voyage Out does not condescend to its communicatively inhibited inhabitants. Instead, she celebrates the little victories they manage to achieve. Rachel and Terence’s affair is compelling throughout. We also hear the author’s voice in the response of Rachel’s aunt, Helen, to her niece’s description of their community’s interactions as “aimless, trivial, meaningless.” Rather than belittling her English companions, Helen reflects on “the little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon,” concluding that “underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings, great things were happening—terrible because they were so great.”

>Henry: I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.
Debbie: Death?
Henry: People saying they preferred the early stuff.
-          Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

Toni Morrison’s “early stuff” occupies a stratum in world literature that is difficult for any writer to live up to. This week, The Guardian’s panel of 172 literary luminaries declared Morrison’s Beloved the second greatest novel in the artform’s history, placing her work above that of every fictionist who ever lived apart from George Eliot. Hardly surprising, then, that Morrison received fewer adulatory notices at 84 years of age than she did at her zenith. Still, I can’t help feeling almost personally affronted by the myopic ingratitude of some of the elite critics tasked with assessing God Help the Child, the eleventh and final novel (she was working on a twelfth when she died) by this generation’s literary doyenne. Kara Walker of The New York Times compared it to reality TV and dismissed it as a “curt fable” aimed at provoking “outrage.” The Independent complained Morrison’s characters were “prototypes for an idea rather than real people.” In The Washington Post, Ron Charles was by turns tone-deaf (“the novel rolls along from trauma to trauma, throwing off wisdom like Mardi Gras bling”) and snarky (“If thoughts like that strike you as both fresh and somehow eternal, you’re in luck: There are a lot of them here”), at one point helpfully pointing out that “You not the woman I want” was “a jarring bit of Ebonics” in the mouth of a character with academic bona fides, as though America’s most celebrated poet of everyday Black speech had accidentally misplaced a helping verb. Charles managed one salient insight in dispensing his breathtakingly disrespectful review: “Because her latest work offers curious reflections of where she began in The Bluest Eye, it’s tempting to read God Help the Child as a capstone of her jeweled career.” In context, this observation was merely another opportunity to insult a national treasure, but he was right about the shared genetic tissue tying Morrison’s 1970 debut, about a Black child who longs to look whiter, to her 2015 swansong, about a dark-skinned woman who outlives the consensus that Black is ugly.

The relationship between the two novels has frequently been noted, but a 2015 Essence interview with Morrison confirms my suspicion that it runs deeper than a shared interest in colorism within the Black community. “[Racism today] is certainly not like The Bluest Eye,” Morrison said. “God Help the Child is set in 2007 or 2008, so it’s quite different. I felt I could hang on to that; I could write about those changes.” Functionally speaking, God Help the Child is an unofficial sequel to The Bluest Eye. It consciously revisits the racial trauma Morrison symbolized in the paternal sexual abuse of young Pecola Breedlove in 1940s Ohio and examines the continued legacy of that trauma in the adult lives of twenty-first-century Black New Yorkers. God Help the Child may not always exhibit the formal inventiveness, heightened lyrical expressiveness, and raw power of the slim volume that catapulted Morrison from a publishing career to the pinnacle of world literature. But to understate the latter novel’s commentary on its seminal predecessor is to miss the source of its own substantial emotional clout.

PHYSICAL BEAUTY

The masterstroke of The Bluest Eye was the identification of societal conceptions of beauty as a subtle enforcement mechanism employed by racist white America. Yes, more conventional applications of racial violence are invoked in that book: white men forcing Pecola’s parents to perform for their own sexual gratification, a white gynecologist comparing Black mothers to horses, a candy store clerk shrinking from Pecola’s inadvertent touch during a financial transaction. But the greatest violence in Morrison’s debut is perpetrated by the impossible standard of white beauty. Pecola’s mother trying to emulate Jean Harlow’s movie star hair. A “mulatto girl” in a Claudette Colbert movie hating her mother for her blackness. The insidious consensus that “a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” This depiction of the weaponization of physical beauty by white America had personal magnitude for Morrison. The book is set in 1941 Lorain, Ohio, the precise time and place the author occupied as a ten year old.

God Help the Child demonstrates the legacy of that trauma in 2007 New York City. The characters are adults now. They are successful in ways that Pecola could only dream of: protagonist Bride is a cosmetics executive and her lover Booker (a name with as much explicit significance as “Breedlove”) is an intellectual with a graduate education. Yet God Help the Child is not an unmitigated Huxtable-esque success story. Every character in it struggles to overcome some form of childhood abuse. The unflinching focus on the permanent wounds of child abuse is reflected in Morrison’s preferred title, rejected by Alfred Knopf: The Wrath of Children.

In this context of trauma-haunted racial progress, Morrison asserts that the contemporary fetishization of Black beauty can be almost as unhealthy as the denial of it. The opening chapters retread the Pecola issues: its rotating first-person narration begins with Bride’s mother, Sweetness, confessing that she resisted physical contact with her infant daughter out of revulsion for her skin color. But when Bride comes of age, the world showers her with praise for her physical appearance. An especially effective moment in the novel is the way a white boyfriend attempts to act out Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a 1967 film about a white daughter who teaches her parents to tolerate her boyfriend Sidney Poitier, for reasons that have nothing to do with racial justice:

>I remember one date in particular, a medical student who persuaded me to join him on a visit to his parents’ house up north. As soon as he introduced me it was clear I was there to terrorize his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he kept repeating. “Look at her, Mother? Dad?” His eyes were gleaming with malice. But they outclassed him with their warmth—however faked—and charm. His disappointment was obvious, his anger thinly repressed. His parents even drove me to the train stop, probably so I wouldn’t have to put up with his failed racist joke on them. I was relieved, even knowing what the mother did with my used teacup.

The boyfriend wants to weaponize societal antiracist frown power just to make his parents feel uncomfortable. Morrison doesn’t trust that sort of performative adulation of Blackness any more than she trusts Bride’s dependence on it: “That’s all she’s invested in,” Morrison explained to Essence. “She’s not complete. Either one of those things is destructive: Using it as a boost or being destroyed by it.” Of course, beauty has been the tool of the oppressor against women in general, and not just Black Americans, for centuries. Morrison is writing about the keen blade’s underside hidden in every introduction of “my accomplished son and beautiful daughters” or “the lovely Miss So-and-So.”

ROMANTIC LOVE

In both The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child, Morrison couples the idolatrous worship of physical beauty with that of romantic love. In one scene, little Pecola reflects on the men who are always loving and leaving women in popular music. “How do you do that?” she asks. “I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” Her mother, Pauline, the one exposing Pecola to old love songs, has long associated beauty and love in an unhealthy way: “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”

For its part, God Help the Child portrays the way that an obsessive romantic love based on attraction crumbles into tragedy when the beloved leaves. Bride is so devastated by Booker’s sudden exit that her body literally begins to change: “Flat-chested and without underarm or pubic hair, pierced ears and stable weight, she tried and failed to forget what she believed was her crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl.” She becomes the battered victim who accused an innocent woman of child abuse in order to win her colorist mother’s love. Put another way, the proud, grown-up Bride regresses back into Pecola’s degraded form. In his review, Ron Charles saw the narrative risk Morrison was taking with this sole departure into Magical Realism and pounced, brutishly:

>In the semi-magical worlds Morrison has created before, such surreal touches seem both evocative and weirdly natural, but in the flat language of this novel, they're clunky symbols, needlessly explained.

In my view, though, that’s a lazy reading. It’s easy to dismiss such a sore-thumb stylistic move, but Morrison’s boldness pays off precisely because it is isolated. It gives her otherwise grounded prose permission to sing.

SELF-LOVE

Morrison’s antidote to these societal afflictions lies in expanded notions of beauty and love. In her introduction to a 2007 edition of The Bluest Eye, Morrison recalled an elementary school classmate who longed for blue eyes, the inspiration for that novel.

>Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word “beautiful,” I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it… In any case it was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

This radical notion of beauty as action as opposed to inherited appearance is played out in Bride’s heroic response to her own pain. Instead of crumbling like Pecola, she takes arms against her sea of troubles, embarking on a quest to find Booker and force him to account for his decision to abandon her. The nuance in this goal is crucial. Bride insists on a respectful separation, not reconciliation at any cost. Revisiting The Bluest Eye in a contemporary context gives Morrison permission to begin writing a healing process that eluded those characters in the first novel. Pecola never moves from self-contempt to self-acceptance. She bears her father’s stillborn child and never recovers. But the news in God Help the Child that Bride and Booker will bear a child of their own signals that that self-love is finally branching into shared love. Bride has learned the lesson Sethe struggles to learn in Beloved: “you your own best thing.”

BEAUTY IS SOMETHING ONE CAN DO

Throughout her glorious canon, Morrison never settled for merely depicting beauty as action. She modeled it in the act of crafting radiant prose of searing insight through shifting vernacular registers. The consistently generous moral wisdom of Morrison’s writing recalls that of her partner at the top of the Guardian’s list: Mary Ann Evans, who defied a world that thought her ugly by becoming George Eliot. In a sense, the Guardian’s selection of Middlemarch and Beloved as English-language literary exemplars is a logical pairing. Eliot’s novel championed a woman of conventional beauty but exceptional moral clarity. Morrison’s championed a woman seen as ugly who fought ferociously for love. Bride earns a place in that tradition.

Morrison never names the year God Help the Child takes place, but she told Essence that it is 2007-2008. In other words, the year that Barack Obama’s message of change temporarily filled the Black community with hope for healing and self-acceptance on a national scale. Today, progress from Pecola’s 1941 to Bride’s 2008 is under assault on the pretense that national racial healing has already been accomplished. The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child provide reminders that abuse leaves wounds that can only be healed by beauty in action.

I sometimes regret not having read Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement. Director Joe Wright’s 2007 film adaptation, which I have seen, deftly explores the fine line between commonplace childhood self-absorption and casually cruel deceit with lasting consequences. It leaves an impression of masterful, must-read source material that may lose its power on the page once you’ve taken the journey on screen. That sense of missed opportunity even motivated me to check out McEwan’s Kafkaesque novella The Cockroach a couple years back, but that was, um, not a comparable experience. When I heard that his 2025 novel What We Can Know was his best reviewed since Atonement, it made sense to grab the newcomer in hardcover before Matin Freeman and Sally Hawkins are cast as its dual narrators in some future film version. The decision paid dividends. McEwan’s tragicomic novel is a finely calibrated indictment of the present from the perspective of a compromised future.

A FUTURE WITH MORE REGRETS THAN FLYING CARS

The book is split between 2025 and 2125 (and the surrounding years), giving McEwan an opportunity to construct his own dystopian reflection of our era in the hall of mirrors of contemporary science fiction. I haven’t read enough sci-fi to rank his dystopia against all the others, but McEwan’s vision of the coming century felt like a reasonably fresh take to me. Instead of describing flying cars and hostile robot overlords, he constructs an Earth that is just beginning to work its way back to the technological accomplishments of our era. Biodiversity, too, is starting to recover from the mass extinctions of our Holocene epoch, although the organic food supply seems beyond renewal. Future generations are loathe to forgive ours for ignoring the climate crisis, empowering reckless artificial intelligence, and mounting nuclear conflicts that apparently have their roots in Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. They are not impressed that our cultural and artistic output dwarfs theirs, and their attitude toward studying our history can be summarized by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s memorable assessment of the 1995 film Carrington: “Who cares about these awful people?”

THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE

I feel better qualified to comment on McEwan’s exploration of the futility of biography than to compare dystopias. Like many of my most cherished literary works, McEwan’s novel portrays biographers struggling to learn critical truths about their subjects. My favorite playwright, the late Tom Stoppard, was fascinated by the theme of “what we can know,” and he famously distrusted biography. In his 1995 play Indian Ink, a footnote-happy poetry editor effuses about the opportunities that artists afford biographers: “This is why God made poets and novelists, so the rest of us can get published.” The elderly sister of a famous poet rejoins, “biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” Stoppard’s finest play, Arcadia, pits a Byron biographer with a galling confidence in his own “gut instinct” about 300-year-old mysteries against a colleague who relishes her own uncertainty (“If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final”). Stoppard admitted he had “pinched” Arcadia’s structure from A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession, one of the best books I read last year. The latter work is about a contemporary scholar who finds an uncatalogued love letter from one major Victorian poet to another in a library book, raising questions about who ultimately owns the secrets of the past. Another Byatt novel, The Biographer’s Tale, depicts a disillusioned graduate student yearning to trade the abstractions of postmodern philosophy for the tangible facts in which a biographer traffics. In this respect, What We Can Know is treading well-worn territory, even hallowed ground.

WHAT WILL OUR DESCENDENTS THINK OF US?

McEwan’s main contribution is to ask not what is knowable about yesterday, as did Stoppard and Byatt, but what will be knowable about today when tomorrow arrives. In this novel, the denizens of the present largely hold the power to choose what is remembered of their time, but their choices usually end up obscuring the very things they most wish to preserve. In this way, McEwan recalls Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “each man kills the thing he loves.” In the novel, Francis Bundy, the most renowned poet of 2025, dreams that his poem “Corona for Vivien” (a corona is a union of seven sonnets) will leave an indelible mark on the future: “Would it, could it be understood? He thought it might need footnotes, sensible, helpful ones, unlike Eliot’s at the end of The Waste Land. He believed that this work equaled or surpassed Eliot’s poem.” Yet when the future arrives, Bundy’s poem is remembered not for its literary achievements but because it seems irretrievably lost to history. Although it remains concealed from the public, rumors circulate about its contents. Based on rumor alone, the poem is celebrated as a paean to a clean environment. In reality, however, Bundy was an intransigent climate denier, the poster boy for our generation’s callousness toward our descendants. Some in the future imagine the corona was an ode to the lost art of interpersonal intimacy. Ironically, Bundy’s wife Vivien may have prevented its publication due to her own marital dissatisfaction.

PROBING OUR DISSOLUTION WITH WIT

The author presents all this moral reckoning with a light comic touch. McEwan’s breezy and confident wit provides a gently barbed send-up of academia that has more in common with the works of Michael Frayn than the dazzling wordplay of Stoppard. Imagine the characters and tone of Frayn’s novel The Trick of It, a comic romp in which a pedantic adjunct marries the novelist he teaches to undergrads, merged with the epistemological themes of his play Copenhagen, in which Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle illuminates the impossibility of reconstructing the past. In one scene, McEwan narrates a poetry reading from Bundy’s perspective, and his oration leaves the audience in stunned silence. A woman wipes away tears. Then, one by one, we enter the listeners’ minds and discover that none of them were paying attention. The woman’s tears were inspired by something else entirely. In another scene, the students of the future stage a walkout of a lecture on Bundy out of righteous disgust with our generation. The superficial suavity of Vivien’s lover Harry Kitchener, whom she deliberately wounds by dating a superior writer, is itself worth the price of admission.

AN ELEGY FOR THE PRESENT

Despite its amusing veneer, What We Can Know is at its core a lament for a society incapable of sustaining itself. McEwan masterfully captures the simultaneous talent, depravity, generosity, and brutality of humanity. When he writes about a 20th century mother dropping acid while her child suffocates in its crib, he is conjuring the greed and convenience that motivate our neglect of the future. When he poignantly portrays an Alzheimer’s victim’s gradual mental disintegration, he gestures toward the loss of communal memory that humanity seems destined to endure. The central question of the book may be whether our heirs will care any more for us than we do for them. Who cares about these awful people, indeed.